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Book 



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COKffilGHT DEPOSIT. 



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WAITING FOR 
DAYLIGHT 



BOOKS BY //. M. TOM LIN SON 

THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 

OI.D JUNK 

LONOON RlVliR 

WAl riNC5 K(m DAYLIGHT 



THE FIRST PRINTING OF THIS BOOK CON- 
SISTS OF TWENTY-ONE HUNDRED COPIES, 
OF WHICH TWO THOUSAND ARE FOR SALE. 

THIS IS NUMBER 



WAITING FOR 
DAYLIGHT 

By H. M. TOMLINSON 




NEW YORK • ALFRED • A • KNOPF • MCMXXII 



COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY 
ALFRED A. KNOPF, Inc. 



Published May, lOSS 






Set up, electrotvped. and printed hy Iko Foil-BoUoii Co., Binphamton, N. T. 

Paper fiirnishtil by Itcnru Lindenmis/r d Sons, Atip York, .V. V. 
Bound 6» tho H. Wolff Estate. New York, N. Y. 



MANUFAOTUBBD IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMEEICA 



JUN -5 1922 



©CI.A661984 



To 
MY WIFE 



CONTENTS 

I. In Ypres 3 

II. A Raid Night 12 

III. Islands 24 

IV. Travel Books 28 
V. Signs of Spring 31 

VI. Prose Writing 36 

VII. The Modern Mind 40 

VIII. Magazines 44 

IX. The Marne 49 

X. Carlyle 56 

XI. Holiday Reading 58 

XII. An Autumn Morning 65 

XIII. News from the Front 74 

XIV. Authors and Soldiers 80 
XV. Waiting for Daylight 88 

XVI. The Nobodies 96 

XVII. Bookworms 112 

XVIII. Sailor Language 115 

XIX. Illusions 120 





Contents 




XX. 


Figure-heads 


127 


XXI. 


Economics 


133 


XXII. 


Old Sunlight 


135 


XXIII. 


RUSKIN 


140 


XXIV. 


The Reward of Virtue 


147 


XXV. 


Great Statesmen 


149 


XXVI. 


Joy 


152 


XXVII. 


The Real Thing 


162 


XXVIII. 


Literary Critics 


170 


XXIX. 


The South Downs 


175 


XXX. 


Kjpling 


182 


XXXI. 


A Devon Estuary 


188 


XXXII. 


Barbellion 


194 


XXXIII. 


Breaking the Spell 


2CX) 



WAITING FOR 
DAYLIGHT 



I. In Ypres 



JULY, 19 1 5. My mouth does not get so 
dry as once it did, I notice, when walking 
in from Suicide Corner to the Cloth Hall. 
There I was this summer day, in Ypres again, in 
a silence like a threat, amid ruins which might 
have been in Central Asia, and I, the last man 
on earth, contemplating them. There was some- 
thing bumping somewhere, but it was not in 
Ypres, and no notice is taken in Flanders of what 
does not bump near you. So I sat on the dis- 
rupted pedestal of a forgotten building and 
smoked, and wondered why I was in the city of 
Ypres, and why there was a war, and why I was 
a fool. 

It was a lovely day, and looking up at the sky 
over what used to be a school dedicated to the 
gentle Jesus, which is just by the place where 
one of the seventeen-inchers has blown a forty- 
foot hole, I saw a little round cloud shape in the 
blue, and then another, and then a cluster of 
them; the kind of soft little cloudlets on which 

[3] 



Waiting for Daylight 

Renaissance cherubs rest their chubby elbows 
and with fat faces inclined on their hands con- 
sider mortals from cemetery monuments. Then 
dull concussions arrived from heaven, and right 
overhead I made out two German 'planes. A 
shell-case banged the pave and went on to make 
a white scar on a wall. Some invisible things 
were whizzing about. One's own shrapnel can 
be tactless. 

There was a cellar near and I got into it, and 
while the intruders were overhead I smoked and 
gazed at the contents of the cellar — the wreck- 
age of a bicycle, a child's chemise, one old boot, 
a jam-pot, and a dead cat. Owing to an unsatis- 
factory smell of many things I climbed out as 
soon as possible and sat on the pedestal again. 

A figure in khaki came straight at me across 
the Square, its boots sounding like the deliber- 
ate approach of Fate in solitude. It stopped 
and saluted, and said: "I shouldn't stay 'ere, 
sir. They gen'ally begin about now. Sure to 
drop some 'ere." 

At that moment a mournful cry went over us, 
followed by a crash in Sinister Street. My way 
home! Some masonry fell in sympathy from 
the Cloth Hall. 

[4] 



In Ypres 

"Better come with me till it blows over, sir. 
I've got a dug-out near." 

We turned off into a part of the city unknown 
to me. There were some unsettling noises, 
worse, no doubt, because of the echoes behind us; 
but it is not dignified to hurry when one looks 
like an officer. One ought to fill a pipe. I 
did so, and stopped to light it. I paused 
while drawing at it, checked by the splitting open 
of the earth in the first turning to the right and 
the second to the left, or thereabouts. 

"That's a big 'un, sir," said my soldier, taking 
half a cigarette from behind his ear and a light 
from my match; we then resumed our little 
promenade. By an old motor 'bus having boards 
for windows, and War Office neuter for its colour, 
but bearing for memory's sake on its brow the 
legend "Liverpool Street," my soldier hurried 
slightly, and was then swallowed up. I was 
alone. While looking about for possible open- 
ings I heard his voice under the road, and then 
saw a dark cavity, low in a broken wall, and 
crawled in. Feeling my way by knocking on the 
dark with my forehead and my shins, I descended 
to a lower smell of graves which was hollowed by 
a lighted candle in a bottle. And there was the 

[5] 



Waiting for Daylight 

soldier, who provided me with an empty box, and 
himself with another, and we had the candle be- 
tween us. On the table were some official docu- 
ments under a shell-nose, and a tin of condensed 
milk suffering from shock. Pictures of partly clad 
ladies began to appear on the walls through the 
gloom. Now and then the cellar trembled. 

"Where's that old 'bus come from?" I asked. 

"Ah ! The pore old bitch, sir," said the sol- 
dier sadly. 

"Yes, of course, but what's the matter with 
her?" 

"She's done in, sir. But she's done her bit, 
she has," said my soldier, changing the crossing 
of his legs. "Ah! little did she think when I 
used to take 'er acrorse Ludget Circus what a 'ell 
of a time I'd 'ave to give 'er some day. She's a 
good ole thing. She's done 'er bit. She won't 
see Liverpool Street no more. If medals wasn't 
so cheap she ought to 'ave one, she ought." 

The cellar had a fit of the palsy, and the can- 
dle-light shuddered and flattened. 

"The ruddy swine are ruddy wild to-day. 
Suthin's upset 'em. 'Ow long will this ruddy 
war last, sir?" asked the soldier, slightly plain- 
tive. 

[6] 



In Ypres 

"I know," I said. "It's filthy. But what 
about your old 'bus?" 

"Ah! what about 'cr. She ain't 'arf 'ad a 
time. She's seen enough war to make a general 
want to go home and shell peas. What she 
knows about it would make them clever fellers in 
London who reckon they know all about it turn 
green if they heard a door slam. Learned it ail 
in one jolly old day, too. Learned it sudden, 
like you gen'ally learn things you don't forget. 
And I reckon I 'adn't anything to find out, either, 
not after Antwerp. Don't tell me, sir, war 
teaches you a lot. It only shows fools what they 
didn't know but might 'ave guessed. 

"You know Poperinghe? Well, my trip was 
between there an' Wipers, gen'ally. The stones 
on the road was enough to make 'er shed nuts 
and bolts by the pint. But it was a quiet 
journey, take it all round, and after a cup o' tea 
at Wipers I used to roll home to the park. 
It was easier than the Putney route. Wipers 
was full of civilians. Shops all open. Estami- 
nets and nice young things. I used to like war 
better than a school-boy likes Sat'd'y after- 
noons. It wasn't work and it wasn't play. 
And there was no law you couldn't break if you 

[7] 



Waiting for Daylight 

'ad sense enough to come to attention smart and 
answer quick. Yes, sir. 

"I knew so little about war then that I'm 
sorry I never tried to be a military expert. But 
my education was neglected. I can only write 
picture postcards. It's a pity. Well, one day 
it wasn't like that. It dropped on Wipers, and 
it wasn't like that. It was bloody different. I 
wasn't frightened, but my little inside was. 

"First thing was the gassed soldiers coming 
through. Their faces were green and blue, and 
their uniform a funny colour. I didn't know 
what was the matter with 'em, and that put the 
wind up, for I didn't want to look like that. We 
could hear a gaudy rumpus in the Salient. The 
civvies were frightened, but they stuck to their 
homes. Nothing was happening there then, 
and while nothing is happening it's hard to be- 
lieve it's going to. After seeing a Zouave crawl 
by with his tongue hanging out, and his face the 
colour of a mottled cucumber, I said good-bye to 
the little girl where I was. It was time to see 
about it. 

"And fact is, I didn't 'ave much time to think 
about it, what with gettin' men out and gettin* 
reinforcements in. Trip after trip. 

"But I shall never have a night again like that 

[8] 



In Ypres 

one. Believe me, it was a howler. I steered 
the old 'bus, but it was done right by accident. 
It was certainly touch and go. I shouldn't 'avc 
thought a country town, even in war, could look 
like Wipers did that night. 

"It was gettin' dark on my last trip, and we 
barged into all the world gettin' out. And the 
guns and reinforcements were comin' up behind 
me. There's no other road out or in, as you 
know. I forgot to tell you that night comin' 
on didn't matter much, because the place was 
alight. The sky was full of shrapnel, and the 
high-explosives were falling in the houses on fire, 
and spreading the red stuff like fireworks. The 
gun ahead of me went over a child, but only its 
mother and me saw that, and a house in flames 
ahead of the gun got a shell inside it, and fell 
on the crowd that was mixed up with the army 
traffic. 

"When I got to a side turning I 'opped off to 
see how my little lady was getting on. A shell 
had got 'er estamlnet. The curtains were flying 
in little flames through the place where the win- 
dows used to be. Inside, the counter was upside 
down, and she was laying with glass and bottles 
on the floor. I couldn't do anything for her. 
And further up the street my headquarters was a 

[9] 



Waiting for Daylight 

heap of bricks, and the houses on both sides of it 
on fire. No good looking there for any more 
orders. 

"Being left to myself, I began to take notice. 
While you're on the job you just do it, and don't 
see much of anything else except out of the 
corner of the eye. I've never 'eard such a 
row — shells bursting, houses falling, and the 
place was foggy with smoke, and men you 
couldn't see were shouting, and the women and 
children, wherever they were, turning you cold 
to hear 'em. 

"It was like the end of the world. Time for 
me to 'op it. I backed the old 'bus and turned 
'er, and started off — shells in front and behind 
and overhead, and, thinks I, next time you're 
bound to get caught in this shower. Then I 
found my officer. 'E was smoking a cigarette, 
and 'e told me my job. 'E gave me my cargo. 
I just 'ad to take 'em out and dump 'em. 

" 'Where shall I take 'em, sir?' 

" 'Take 'em out of this,' says he. 'Take 'em 
anywhere, take 'em where you like, Jones, take 
'em to hell, but take 'em away,' says he. 

"So I loaded up. Wounded Tommies, gassed 
Arabs, some women and children, and a few 
lunatics, genuine cock-eyed loonies from the 
[10] 



In Ypres 

asylum. The shells chased us out. One biffed 
us over on to the two rear wheels, but we dropped 
back on four on the top speed. Several times I 
bumped over soft things in the road and felt 
rather sick. We got out o' the town with the 
shrapnel a bit in front all the way. Then the 
old 'bus jibbed for a bit. Every time a shell 
burst near us the lunatics screamed and laughed 
and clapped their hands, and trod on the 
wounded, but I got 'er goin' again. I got 'er 
to Poperinghe. Two soldiers died on the way, 
and a lunatic had fallen out somewhere, and a 
baby was born in the 'bus; and me with no con- 
ductor and no midwife. 

"I met our chaplain and says he : 'Jones, you 
want a drink. Come with me and have a 
Scotch.' That was a good drink. I 'ad the 
best part of 'arf a bottle without water, and it 
done me no 'arm. Next morning I found I'd 
put in the night on the parson's bed in me boots, 
and 'e was asleep on the floor." 



["] 



II. A Raid Night 

SEPTEMER 17, 1915. I had crossed 
from France to Fleet Street, and was 
thankful at first to have about me the things 
I had proved, with their suggestion of intimacy, 
their look of security; but I found the once 
familiar editorial rooms of that daily paper a 
little more than estranged. I thought them 
worse, if anything, than Ypres. Ypres is within 
the region where, when soldiers enter it, they 
abandon hope, because they have become sane at 
last, and their minds have a temperature a little 
below normal. In Ypres, whatever may have 
been their heroic and exalted dreams, they awake, 
see the world is mad, and surrender to the doom 
from which they know a world bereft will give 
them no reprieve. 

There was a way in which the office of that 
daily paper was familiar. I had not expected 
it, and it came with a shock. Not only the com- 
pulsion, but the bewildering inconsequence of 
war was suggested by its activities. Reason was 

[12] 



A Raid Night 

not there. It was ruled by a blind and fixed 
idea. The glaring artificial light, the headlong 
haste of the telegraph instruments, the wild 
litter on the floor, the rapt attention of the men 
scanning the news, their abrupt movements and 
speed when they had to cross the room, still 
with their gaze fixed, their expression that of 
those who dreaded something worse to happen; 
the suggestion of tension, as though the Last 
Trump were expected at any moment, filled me 
with vague alarm. The only place where that 
incipient panic is not usual is the front line, be- 
cause there the enemy is within hail, and is known 
to be another unlucky fool. But I allayed my 
anxiety. I leaned over one of the still figures 
and scanned the fateful document which had 
given its reader the aspect of one who was star- 
ing at what the Moving Finger had done. Its 
message was no more than the excited whisper 
of a witness who had just left a keyhole. But 
I realized in that moment of surprise that this 
office was an essential feature of the War; with- 
out it, the War might become Peace. It pro- 
voked the emotions which assembled civilians in 
ecstatic support of the sacrifices, just as the staff 
of a corps headquarters, at some comfortable 
leagues behind the trenches, maintains its fight- 

[13] 



Waiting for Daylight 

ing men in the place where gas and shells tend to 
engender common sense and irresolution. 

I left the glare of that office, its heat and 
half-hysterical activity, and went into the cool- 
ness and quiet of the darkened street, and there 
the dread left me that it could be a duty of mine 
to keep hot pace with patriots in full stampede. 
The stars were wonderful. It is such a tran- 
quillizing surprise to discover there arc stars 
over London. Until this War, when the street 
illuminations were doused, we never knew it. It 
strengthens one's faith to discover the Pleiades 
over London; it is not true that their delicate 
glimmer has been put out by the remarkable in- 
candescent energy of our power stations. There 
they are still. As I crossed London Bridge the 
City was as silent as though it had come to the 
end of its days, and the shapes I could just make 
out under the stars were no more substantial 
than the shadows of its past. Even the Thames 
was a noiseless ghost. London at night gave me 
the illusion that I was really hidden from the 
monstrous trouble of Europe, and, at least for 
one sleep, had got out of the War. I felt that 
my suburban street, secluded in trees and un- 
importance, was as remote from the evil I knew 
of as though it were in Alaska. When I came 

[14] 



A Raid Night 

to that street I could not see my neighbours' 
homes. It was with some doubt that I found 
my own. And there, with three hours to go to 
midnight, and a book, and some circumstances 
that certainly had not changed, I had retired 
thankfully into a fragment of that world I had 
feared we had completely lost. 

"What a strange moaning the birds in the 
shrubbery are making!" my companion said once. 
I listened to it, and thought it was strange. 
There was a long silence, and then she looked up 
sharply. "What's that?" she asked. "Listen!" 

I listened. My hearing is not good. 

"Nothing!" I assured her. 

"There it is again." She put down her book 
with decision, and rose, I thought, in some alarm. 

"Trains," I suggested. "The gas bubbling. 
The dog next door. Your imagination." Then 
I listened to the dogs. It was curious, but they 
all seemed awake and excited. 

"What is the noise like?" I asked, surrender- 
ing my book on the antiquity of man. 

She twisted her mouth in a comical way most 
seriously, and tried to mimic a deep and solemn 
note. 

"Guns," I said to myself, and went to the 
front door. 

[15] 



Waiting for Daylight 

Beyond the vague opposite shadows of some 
elms lights twinkled in the sky, incontinent 
sparks, as though glow lamps on an invisible 
pattern of wires were being switched on and 
off by an idle child. That was shrapnel. I 
walked along the empty street a little to get a 
view between and beyond the villas. I turned 
to say something to my companion, and saw then 
my silent neighbours, shadowy groups about me, 
as though they had not approached but had 
materialized where they stood. We watched 
those infernal sparks. A shadow lit its pipe 
and offered me its match. I heard the guns 
easily enough now, but they were miles away. 

A slender finger of brilliant light moved 
slowly across the sky, checked, and remained 
pointing, firmly accusatory, at something It had 
found in the heavens. A Zeppelin! 

There it was, at first a wraith, a suggestion 
on the point of vanishing, and then illuminated 
and embodied, a celestial maggot stuck to the 
round of a cloud like a caterpillar to the edge 
of a leaf. We gazed at it silently, I cannot say 
for how long. The beam of light might have 
pinned the bright larva to the sky for the in- 
spection of interested Londoners. Then some- 
body spoke. "I think it is coming our way." 

[i6] 



A Raid Night 

I thought so too. I went indoors, calling out 
to the boy as I passed his room upstairs, and 
went to where the girls were asleep. Three 
miles, three minutes! It appears to be harder 
to waken children when a Zeppelin is coming 
your way. I got the elder girl awake, lifted her, 
and sat her on the bed, for she had become 
heavier, I noticed. Then I put her small sister 
over my shoulder, as limp and indifferent as a 
half-filled bag. By this time the elder one had 
snuggled into the foot of her bed, resigned to 
that place if the other end were disputed, and 
was asleep again. I think I became annoyed, 
and spoke sharply. We were in a hurry. The 
boy was waiting for us at the top of the stairs. 

"What's up?" he asked with merry interest, 
hoisting his slacks. 

"Come on down," I said. 

We went into a central room, put coats round 
them, answering eager and innocent questions 
with inconsequence, had the cellar door and a 
light ready, and then went out to inspect affairs. 
There were more searchlights at work. Bright 
diagonals made a living network on the over- 
head dark. It was remarkable that those rigid 
beams should not rest on the roof of night, but 
that their ends should glide noiselessly about the 

[17] 



Waiting for Daylight 

invisible dome. The nearest of them was fol- 
lowed, when in the zenith, by a faint oval of 
light. Sometimes it discovered and broke on 
delicate films of high fair-weather clouds. The 
shells were still twinkling brilliantly, and the 
guns were making a rhythmless baying in the 
distance, like a number of alert and indignant 
hounds. But the Zeppelin had gone. The 
firing diminished and stopped. 

They went to bed again, and as I had become 
acutely depressed, and the book now had no 
value, I turned in myself, assuring everyone, 
with the usual confidence of the military expert, 
that the affair was over for the night. But once 
in bed I found I could see there only the progress 
humanity had made in its movement heavenwards. 
That is the way with us; never to be con- 
cerned with the newest clever trick of our enter- 
prising fellow-men till a sudden turn of affairs 
shows us, by the immediate threat to our own 
existence, that that cleverness has added to the 
peril of civilized society, whose house has been 
built on the verge of the pit. War now would be 
not only between soldiers. In future wars the 
place of honour would be occupied by the infants, 
in their cradles. For war is not murder. Starv- 
ing children is war, and it is not murder. What 

[i8] 



A Raid Night 

treacherous lying is all the heroic poetry of 
battle ! Men will now creep up after dark, am- 
bushed in safety behind the celestial curtains, 
and drop bombs on sleepers beneath for the 
greater glory of some fine figment or other. It 
filled me, not with wrath at the work of Kaisers 
and Kings, for we know what is possible with 
them, but with dismay at the discovery that 
one's fellows are so docile and credulous that 
they will obey any order, however abominable. 
The very heavens had been fouled by this ob- 
scene and pallid worm, crawling over those 
eternal verities to which eyes had been lifted for 
light when night and trouble were over dark. 
God was dethroned by science. One looked 
startled at humanity, seeing not the accustomed 
countenance, but, for a moment, glimpsing in- 
stead the baleful lidless stare of the evil of the 
slime, the unmentionable of a nightmare; . . . 

A deafening crash brought us out of bed in 
one movement. I must have been dozing. Some- 
one cried, "My children!" Another rending up- 
roar interrupted my effort to shepherd the flock 
to a lower floor. There was a raucous avalanche 
of glass. We muddled down somehow — I forget 
how. I could not find the matches. Then in 
the dark we lost the youngest for some eternal 

[19] 



Waiting for Daylight 

seconds while yet another explosion shook the 
house. We got to the cellar stairs, and at last 
there they all were, their backs to the coals, sit- 
ting on lumber. 

A candle was on the floor. There were more 
explosions, somewhat muffled. The candle-flame 
showed a little tremulous excitement, as if it 
were one of the party. It reached upwards 
curiously in a long intent flame, and then shrank 
flat with what it had learned. We were accom- 
panied by grotesque shadows. They stood about 
us on the white and unfamiliar walls. We 
waited. Even the shadows seemed to listen with 
us; they hardly moved, except when the candle- 
flame was nervous. Then the shadows wavered 
slightly. We waited. I caught the boy's eye, 
and winked. He winked back. The youngest, 
still with sleepy eyes, was trembling, though not 
with cold, and this her sister noticed, and put her 
arms about her. His mother had her hand on 
her boy's shoulder. 

There was no more noise outside. It was 
time, perhaps, to go up to see what had hap- 
pened. I put a raincoat over my pyjamas, and 
went into the street. Some of my neighbours, 
who were special constables, hurried by. The 
enigmatic night, for a time, for five minutes, or 

[20] 



A Raid Night 

five seconds (I do not know how long it was), 
was remarkably still and usual. It might have 
been pretending that we were all mistaken. It 
was as though we had been merely dreaming our 
recent excitements. Then, across a field, a villa 
began to blaze. Perhaps it had been stunned 
till then, and had suddenly jumped into a panic 
of flames. It was wholly involved in one roll 
of fire and smoke, a sudden furnace so consuming 
that, when it as suddenly ceased, giving one or 
two dying spasms, I had but an impression of 
flames rolling out of windows and doors to per- 
suade me that what I had seen was real. The 
night engulfed what may have been an illusion, for 
till then I had never noticed a house at that point. 
Whispers began to pass of tragedies that 
were incredible in their incidence and craziness. 
Three children were dead in the rubble of one 
near villa. The ambulance that was passing was 
taking their father to the hospital. A woman 
had been blown from her bed into the street. 
She was unhurt, but she was insane. A long 
row of humbler dwellings, over which the dust 
was still hanging in a faint mist, had been de- 
molished, and one could only hope the stories 
about that place were far from true. We were 
turned away when we would have assisted; all 

[21] 



Waiting for Daylight 

the help that was wanted was there. A stranger 
offered me his tobacco pouch, and it was then I 
found my rainproof was a lady's, and therefore 
had no pipe in its pocket. 

The sky was suspect, and we watched it, but 
saw only vacuity till one long beam shot into it, 
searching slowly and deliberately the whole 
mysterious ceiling, yet hesitating sometimes, and 
going back on its path as though intelligently 
suspicious of a matter which it had passed over 
too quickly. It peered into the immense caverns 
of a cloud to which it had returned, illuminating 
to us unsuspected and horrifying possibilities of 
hiding-places above us. We expected to see the 
discovered enemy boldly emerge then. Nothing 
came out. Other beams by now had joined the 
pioneer, and the night became bewildering with 
a dazzling mesh of light. Shells joined the wan- 
dering beams, those sparks of orange and red. 
A world of fantastic chimney-pots and black 
rounds of trees leaped into being between us and 
the sudden expansion of a fan of yellow flame. 
A bomb! We just felt, but hardly heard, the 
shock of it. A furious succession of such bursts 
of light followed, a convulsive opening and shut- 
ting of night. We saw that when midnight is 
cleft asunder It has a fiery inside. 

[22] 



A Raid Night 

The eruptions ceased. Idle and questioning, 
not knowing wc had heard the last gun and 
bomb of the affair, a little stunned by the mani- 
acal rapidity and violence of this attack, we found 
ourselves gazing at the familiar and shadowy 
peace of our suburb as we have always known it. 
It had returned to that aspect. But something 
had gone from it for ever. It was not, and 
never could be again, as once we had known it. 
The security of our own place had been based 
on the goodwill or indifference of our fellow- 
creatures everywhere. To-night, over that ob- 
scure and unimportant street, we had seen a 
celestial portent illuminate briefly a little of the 
future of mankind. 



[23] 



III. Islands 

JANUARY 5, 1918. The editor of the 
Hibhert Journal betrays a secret and 
lawless passion for islands. They must be 
small sanctuaries, of course, far and isolated; for 
he shows quite rightly that places like the British 
Isles are not islands in any just and poetic sense. 
Our kingdom is earth, sour and worm-riddled 
earth, with all its aboriginal lustre trampled out. 
By islands he means those surprising landfalls, 
Kerguelen, the Antarctic Shetlands, Timor, Am- 
boyna, the Carolines, the Marquesas, and the 
Galapagos. An island with a splendid name, 
which I am sure he would have mentioned had 
he thought of it, is Fernando de Noronha. 

There must be a fair number of people to-day 
who cherish that ridiculous dream of an oceanic 
solitude. We remember that whenever a story- 
teller wishes to make enchantment seem thor- 
oughly genuine, he begins upon an island. One 
might say, if in a hurry, that Defoe began it, but 
in leisure recall the fearful spell of islands in 
the Greek legends. It is easily understood. If 

[24] 



Islands 

you have watched at sea an island shape, and 
pass, forlorn in the waste, apparently lifeless, 
and with no movement to be seen but the silent 
fountains of the combers, then you know where 
the Sirens were born, and why awful shapes grew 
in the minds of the simple Greeks out of the 
wonders in Crete devised by the wise and mys- 
terious Minoans, who took yearly the tribute of 
Greek youth — youth which never returned to 
tell. 

How easily the picture of one's first island in 
foreign seas comes back! I had not expected 
mine, and was surprised one morning, when 
eastward-bound in the Mediterranean, to see a 
pallid mass of rock two miles to port, when I 
had imagined I knew the charts of that sea well 
enough. It was a frail ghost of land on that 
hard blue plain, and had a light of its own; but 
it looked arid and forbidding, a place of seamen's 
bones. Turning quickly to the mate I asked 
for its name. "Alboran," he said, very quietly, 
without looking at it, as though keeping some- 
thing back. He said no more. But while that 
strange glimmer was on the sea I watched it; I 
have learned nothing since of Alboran; and so 
the memory of that brief sight of a strange rock 
is as though once I had blundered on a dreadful 

[25] 



Waiting for Daylight 

secret which the men who knew it preferred to 
keep. 

But there is a West Indian Island which for 
me is the best in the seas, because the memory of 
it is but a reflection of my last glimpse of the 
tropics. That landfall in the Spanish Main 
was as soundless as a dream. It was but an 
apparition of land. It might have been no more 
than an unusually vivid recollection of a desire 
which had once stirred the imagination of a boy. 
Looking at it, I felt sceptical, quite unprepared 
to believe that what once was a dream could be 
coming true by any chance of my drift through 
the years. Yet there it remained, right in our 
course, on a floor of malachite which had stains 
of orange drift-weed. It could have been a 
mirage. It appeared diaphanous, something so 
frail that a wind could have stirred it. Did it 
belong to this earth? It grew higher, and the 
waves could be seen exploding against its lower 
rocks. It ivas a dream come true. Yet even 
now, as I shall not have that landfall again, I 
have a doubt that waters could be of the colours 
which were radiant about that island, that rocks 
could be of rose and white, that trees could be 
so green and aromatic, and light — except of the 
Hesperides, which are lost — so like the exhil- 

[26] 



Islands 

arating life and breath of the prime. A doubt 
indeed! For every whisper one hears to-day 
deepens the loom of a gigantic German attack. 



[27] 



IV. Travel Books 

JANUARY 19, 19 1 8. What long hours 
at night we wait for sleep! Sleep will 
not come. A friend, who grows more 
like a sallow congestion of scorn than a comfort- 
able companion, warned me yesterday, when I 
spoke of the end of the War, that it might have 
no end. He said that we could not escape our 
fate. Our star, I gathered, was to receive a ce- 
lestial spring-cleaning. There would be bonfires 
of litter. We had become impeded with the 
rubbish of centuries of wise and experienced 
statecraft, and we had hardly more than begun 
to get rid of it. A renaissance with a vengeance ! 
Youth was in revolt against the aged and the 
dead. 

But what an idea to look at when waiting 
for sleep ! I turned over with another sigh, and 
recalled that William James has advised us that 
a deleterious thought may be exorcised by 
willing another that is sunny. I tried to com- 
mand a more enjoyable picture for eyes that were 

[28] 



Travel Books 

closed but intent. Yet you never know where 
the most promising image will transport you 
through some inconsequential association. I 
recalled a pleasing day in the Eastern Mediter- 
ranean, and that brought Eothen into my mind, 
by chance. And instantly, instead of seeing 
Sfax in Tunis, I was looking down from a win- 
dow on a black-edged day of rain, watching an 
unending procession of moribund figures jolting 
over the pave of a street in Flanders, in every 
kind of conveyance, from the Yser. There I was, 
back at the War, at two in the morning, and all 
because I had read Eothen desperately in odd 
moments while waiting for the signs which would 
warn me that the enemy was about to enter that 
village. 

No escape yet! I could hear the old clock 
slowly making its way towards another day. I 
heard a belated wayfarer going home, his feet 
muffled in snow. Anyhow, I never had much of 
an opinion of Eothen, a book over which the 
cymbals have been banged too loudly. Compare 
it, as a travel book, for substance and style, with 
A Week on the Concord; though that is a silly 
thing to ask, if no sillier than literary criticism 
usually is. But though all the lists the critics 
make of our best travel books invariably give 

[29] 



Waiting for Daylight 

Kinglake's a principal place, I have not once 
seen Thoreau's narrative included. 

What is the test for such a book? I should 
ask it to be a trustworthy confidence of a king- 
dom where the marches may be foreign to our 
cheap and usual experience, though familiar 
enough to our dreams. It may not offer, but it 
must promise that Golden City which drew 
Raleigh to the Orinoco, Thoreau to Walden 
Pond, Doughty to Arabia, Livingstone to Tan- 
ganyika, and Hudson to the Arctic. The fountain 
of life is there. We hope to come to our own. 

We never notice whether that country has good 
corn-land, or whether it is rich enough in minerals 
to arouse an interest in its future. But Its 
prospects are lovely and of good report. It 
is always a surprise to find the earth can look so 
good, and behave so handsomely, on the quiet, 
to a vagabond traveller like Thoreau, who has 
no valid excuse for not being at honest work, as 
though it reserved its finest mornings to show 
to favoured children when really good people are 
not about. The Sphinx has a secret only for 
those who do not see her wink. 



[30] 



V. Signs of Spring 

FEBRUARY i6, 1918. A catalogue of 
second-hand books was sent to me yes- 
terday. A raid warning, news of the 
destruction of Parliament House, or a whisper 
of the authentic ascent of Mr. Lloyd George in a 
fiery chariot and of the flight of God, would do 
no more to us than anothjer kick does to the dead. 
But that catalogue had to be handled to be be- 
lieved. It was an incredible survival from the 
days before the light went out. Those minor 
gratifications have gone. I had even forgotten 
they were ever ours. Sometimes now one 
wakes to a morning when the window is a golden 
square, a fine greeting to a good earth, and the 
whistle of a starling in the apple tree just outside 
is as tenuous as a thread of silver; the smell of 
coffee brings one up blithe as a boy about to begin 
play again. Yet something we feel to be wrong 
— a foggy memory of an ugly dream — ah, yes; 
the War, the War. The damned remembrance 
of things as they are drops its pall. The morn- 

[31] 



Waiting for Daylight 

ing paper, too, I see, has the information that our 
men are again cheerfully waiting for the spring 
offensive. 

Cheerfully! But, of course, the editor knows. 
And the, spring offensive ! I have seen that kind 
of vernal gladness. What an advent! When 
you find the first blue egg in the shrubbery behind 
your billet in Artois; when the G. S. O. 2 comes 
into the mess with a violet in his fingqrs, and 
shows it to every doubter, then you know the 
time has come for the testing of the gas cyl- 
inders, and you wonder whether this is the last 
time you will be noteworthy because you had the 
earliest news of the chiffchaff. The spring of- 
fensive ! Guns are now converging by leagues 
of roads to a new part of the Front, to try to 
do there what they failed to do elsewhere. 
The men, as all important editors know, are 
happily waiting for the great brutes to begin 
bellowing again in infernal concert. So there 
accumulates at breakfast in these spring days all 
that evidence which makes one proud to share 
with one's fellows the divine gift of reason, in- 
stead of a blind and miserable animal instinct. 
No wonder the cuckoo has a merry note ! 

That is the way we idle and hapless civilians 
now begin our day. I look up to the sky, and 

[32] 



Signs of Spring 

wonder whether this inopportune spell of fine 
weather means that some London children will 
be killed in bed to-night. As I pass the queues 
of women who have been waiting for hours for 
potatoes, and probably won't get any, though 
the earth doubtless is still abundant, if we had 
but the sense and opportunity to try it, I can- 
not help wondering whether it would not have 
been better for us to have refused the gift of 
reason from which could be devised the edify- 
ing wonders of civilization, and have remained 
in the treetops instead, so ignorant that we were 
unaware we were lucky. 

Another grave statement by a great states- 
man, and, when we are fortunate, a field post- 
card, are to-day our full literary deserts. Is it 
surprising that catalogues of old books do not 
come our way? We do not deserve them. 
Hope faintly revives, when the postman cheers 
us with an overdue field postcard, of a morning 
to dawn when the abstraction we name the "aver- 
age intelligence" and the "great heart of the 
public" and the "herd mind," will not only regret 
that it made a ruinous fool of itself the night 
before, but solemnly resolve to end all dis- 
ruptive and dirty habits. This wild hope was 
born in me of such a postcard (all right so far!) 

[33] 



Waiting for Daylight 

coinciding with the arrival of the list of old books. 
It seemed at that moment that things could 
be different and better. Then, when closing the 
front door that morning — very gently — not 
slamming it on the run — I saw something else. 
The door noiselessly closed, an easy launch into a 
tranquil day, as though I had come down through 
the night with the natural process of the hours, 
and so had commenced the day at the right mo- 
ment, I noticed the twig of a lilac bush had 
intruded into the porch. It directly indicated 
me with a black finger. What did it want? I 
looked intently, sure that an omen was here. 
Aha ! So that was it ! The twig was showing 
me that it had a green nail. 

Four young officers of the Flying Corps 
passed me, going ahead briskly, and I thought 
that an elm under which they walked had kin- 
dling in it a suggestion of coloured light. But it 
was too delicate to be more than a hope. It 
must be confessed that the men who fight in the 
air were more distinct than that light. Then the 
four officers parted, two to either side, when 
marching past another figure. They went be- 
yond it swiftly, taking no notice of it, turned 
into the future, and vanished. I drew near the 

[34] 



Signs of Spring 

bowed and leisurely being, which had a spade 
over its shoulder. 

It stopped to light a pipe, and I caught up to 
it. The edge of the spade was like silver with 
use, and the big hand which grasped it was 
brown with dry earth. The lean neck of this 
figure was tinctured with many summers, and 
cross-hatched by the weather and mature male- 
ness. I caught a smell of newly-turned earth. 
The figure moved as though time were nothing. 
It turned Its face as I drew level, and said it was 
a good morning. The morning was better 
than good; and somehow this object in an old hat 
and clothes as rough as bark, with a face which 
probably had the same expression when William 
was momentous at Hastings, and when Pitt 
solemnly ordered the map of Europe to be rolled 
up, was In accord with the light in the elm, and 
the superior and convincing Insolence of the 
blackbirds. They all suggested the tantalizing 
idea that solid ground Is near us. In this un- 
reasonable world of anxious change, If only we 
had intelligence enough to know where to look 
for It. 



[35] 



VI. Prose Writing 

MARCH i6, 1918. A critic has been 
mourning because good prose is not 
being written to-day. This surprised 
him, and he asked why it was that when poetry, 
which he pictured as "primroses and violets," 
found abundance of nourishment even in the un- 
likely compost these latter days provide, yet 
prose, which he saw as "cabbages and potatoes," 
made but miserable growth. 

It is hard to explain it, for I must own that the 
image of the potato confuses me. One has seen 
modern verse which was, florally, very spud-like. 
If those potatoes were meant for violets then 
they suggest more than anything else a simple 
penny guide-book for their gardeners. Here we 
see at least the danger of using flowers of speech, 
when violets and onions get muddled in the same 
posy, and how ill botany is likely to serve the 
writer who flies heedlessly to it for literary 
symbols. Figures of speech are pregnant with 
possibilities (I myself had better be very careful 
here) , and those likely to show most distress over 

[36] 



Prose Writing 

their progeny are the unlucky fathers. For the 
first thing expected of any literary expression is 
that it should be faithful to what is in the mind, 
and if for the idea of good prose writing the 
image of a potato is given, then it can but repre- 
sent the features of the earthy lumps which are 
common to the stalls of the market-place. What 
is prose? Sodden and lumbering stuff, I suppose. 
And what is poetry? That fortunate lighting of 
an idea which delights us with the behef that we 
have surprised truth, and have seen that it is 
beautiful. 

The difficulty with what the textbooks tell us 
is prose is that many of us make it, not naturally 
and unconsciously like the gentleman who dis- 
covered he had been doing it all his life, but 
professionally. Consider the immense output of 
novels — but no, do not let us consider anything so 
surprising and perplexing. The novel, that most 
exacting problem in the sublimation of the history 
of our kind, not to be solved with ease, it now 
appears may be handled by children as a profit- 
able pastime. Children, of course, should be 
taught to express themselves in writing, and 
simply, lucidly, and with sincerity. Yet all edi- 
tors know the delusion is common with beginners 
in journalism that the essay, a form in which per- 

[37] 



Waiting for Daylight 

haps only six writers have been successful In the 
history of English letters, is but a prelude to 
serious work, a holiday before the realities have 
begun. They all attempt it. Every editorial 
letter-box is loaded with essays every morning. 
Yet the love of learning, and wisdom and hu- 
mour, are not usual, and the gods still more rarely 
give with these gifts the ability to express them 
in the written word; and how often may we count 
on learning, wisdom, and humour being not only 
reflected through a delightful and original char- 
acter, but miraculously condensed into the con- 
trolled display of a bright and revealing beam? 
It is no wonder we have but six essayists ! 

There is no doubt about it. If we mean by 
prose much more than the sincere and lucid 
written expression of our desires and opinions, 
it is because beyond that simplicity we know the 
thrill which is sometimes given by a revelation of 
beauty and significance in common words and 
tidings. The best writing must come of a 
gift for making magic out of what are but com- 
modities to us, and that gift is not distributed by 
the generous gods from barrows which go 
the round of the neighbourhoods where many 
babies are born, as are faith, hope, and credulity, 
those virtues that cause the enormous circula- 

[38] 



Prose Writing 

tions of the picture papers, and form the ready 
material for the careers of statesmen and the 
glory of famous soldiers. It is more unusual. 
We see it as often as we do comets and signs in 
the heavens, a John in the Wilderness again, 
pastors who would die for their lambs, women 
who contemn the ritual and splendour of man- 
slaying, and a politician never moved by the entice- 
ments of a successful career. It is therefore 
likely that when we see great prose for the first 
time we may not know it, and may not enjoy It. 
It can be so disrespectful to what we think is good. 
It may be even brightly innocent of it. And as 
in addition our smaller minds will be overborne by 
the startling activity and cool power of the prose 
of such a writer as Swift, its superiority will only 
enhance our complaining grief. 



[39] 



VII. The Modern Mind 

JULY 6, 19 1 8. A Symphony in Verse has 
just come to me from America. The 
picture on its wrapper shows a man in 
green tights, and whose hair Is blue, veiling his 
eyes before a lady In a flame-coloured robe who 
stares from a distance in a tessellated solitude. 
As London two days ago celebrated Independ- 
ence Day like an American city, and displayed the 
Stars and Stripes so deliriously that the fact that 
George III was ever a British king was lost in 
a common acknowledgment that he was only an- 
other violent fool, this Boston book invited at- 
tention. For ladles in gowns of flame, with arms 
raised In appeal, may be supposed to want more 
than the vote; and American poets wearing 
emerald tights who find themseh^es In abandoned 
temples alone with such ladles, must clearly have 
left Whittler with the nursery biscuits. Long- 
fellow could never grow blue locks. Even Whit- 
man dressed in flannel and ate oranges in public. 
Nor did Poe at his best rise to assure us : 

"This is the night for murder: give us knives: 
We have long sought for this." 

[40] 



The Modem Mind 

Well, not all of us. The truth is some of us 
have not sought for knives with any zest, being 
paltry and early Victorian in our murders. Yet 
in this symphony in verse. The Jig of Forslin, by 
Mr. Conrad Aiken, there are such lines as these: 

"When the skies are pale and stars are cold, 
Dew should rise from the grass in little bubbles, 
And tinkle in music amid green leaves. 
Something immortal lives in such air — 
We breathe, we change. 

Our bodies become as cold and bright as starlight. 
Our Irearts grow young and strange. 
Let us extend ourselves as evening shadows 
And learn the nocturnal secrets of these meadows." 

It is not all knives and murder. The Jig, in 
fact, dances us through a world of ice lighted by 
star gleams and Arctic streamers, where some- 
times our chill loneliness is interrupted by a 
woman whose "mouth is a sly carnivorous 
flower"; where we escape the greenish light of a 
vampire's eyes to enter a tavern where men strike 
each other with bottles. Mermaids are there, 
and Peter and Paul, and when at last Mr. Aiken 
feels the reader may be released, it is as though 
we groped in the dark, bewildered and alarmed, 
for assurance that this was nothing but art. 

One cannot help feeling, while reading this 
product of the modern mind, that we are all a 

[4'] 



Waiting for Daylight 

little mad, and that the cleverest of us know it, 
and indulge the vagaries and instability of in- 
sanity. In an advertisement to Mr. Aiken's 
poetry we are told that it is based on the Freudian 
psychology. We are not seldom reminded to-day 
of that base to the New Art. We are even 
beginning to look on each^ other's simplest acts 
with a new and grave suspicion. It causes a man 
to wonder what obscure motive, probably hellish, 
prompted his wife to brush his clothes, though 
when he caught her at it she was doing it 
in apparent kindness. Instead of the truth mak- 
ing us free, its dread countenance, when we 
glimpse it, only startles us into a pallid mimicry of 
its sinister aspect. It is like the sardonic grin I 
have seen on the face of an inteUigent soldier as 
he strode over filth and corpses towards shell-fire. 
Soldiers, when they are home again, delight in 
watching the faces and the ways of children. 
They want to play with the youngsters, eat buns 
in the street, and join the haymakers. They do 
not want the truth. Without knowing anything 
of Freud, they can add to their new and dreadful 
knowledge of this world all they want of the sub- 
conscious by reading the warlike speeches of the 
aged, one of the most obscene and shocking 
features of the War. The soldiers who are home 

[42] 



The Modem Mind 

on leave turn in revolt from that to hop-scotch. 
Yes, the truth about our own day will hardly bear 
looking at, whether it is reflected from common 
speech, or from the minds of artists like Mr. 
Conrad Aiken. 



[43] 



VIII. Magazines 

JULY 1 6, 19 1 8. I was looking in a hurry 
for something to read. One magazine on 
the bookstall told me it was exactly what I 
wanted for a railway journey. It had a picture 
of a large gun to make its cover attractive. The 
next advertised its claims in another way. A 
girl's face was the decorative feature of its wrap- 
per, and you could not imagine eyes and a simper 
more likely to make a man feel holier than 
Bernard of Cluny till your gaze wandered to the 
face of the girl smirking from the magazine be- 
yond. Is it possible that nobody reads current 
English literature, as the magazines give it, except 
the sort of men who collect golf balls and eat 
green gooseberries? It seems like it. One 
wonders what the editors of those magazines 
read when they are on a railway journey. For it 
would be interesting to know whether this sort of 
thing is done purposely, like glass beads for 
Africa, or whether it is the gift of heaven, 
natural and unconscious, like chickweed. 

[44] 



Magazines 

One would be grateful for direction in this. 
The matter is of some importance, because either 
the producers or the readers are in a bad way; 
and.it would be disheartening to suppose it is the 
readers, for probably there are more readers 
than editors, and so less chance of a cure. I do 
not want to believe it is the readers. It is more 
comforting to suppose those poor people must put 
up with what they can get in a hurry ten minutes 
before the train starts, only to find, as they might 
have guessed, that vacuity is behind the smirk of 
a girl with a face like that. They are forced to 
stuff their literature behind them, so that owner- 
ship of it shall not openly shame them before 
their fellow-passengers. 

With several exceptions, the mass of English 
magazines and reviews may be dismissed in a 
few seconds. The exceptions usually are not out 
yet, or one has seen them. It used not to be 
so, and that is what makes me think it is the pro- 
ducers, and not the readers, who require skilled 
attention. It is startling to turn to the mag- 
azines of twenty or thirty years ago, and to com 
pare them with what is thought good enough for 
us. I was looking through such a magazine re- 
cently, and found a poem by Swinburne, a prose- 
romance by William Morris, and much more work 

[45] 



Waiting for Daylight 

of a quality you would no more expect to find in 
a current magazine than you would palm trees in 
Whitechapel. 

Of all the periodicals which reach the British 
front, the two for which there is most competi- 
tion in any officers' mess are I. a Vic Pans'ienne 
and New York Life. The impudent periodical 
from Paris is universal on our front. The work 
of its artists decorates every dug-out. I should 
say almost every mess subscribes for it. It is true 
it is usual to account for this as being naughty 
chance. Youth has been separated from the 
sober influence of its English home, is away 
from the mild and tranquil light of Oxford Street 
feminity, is given to death, and therefore snatches 
in abandon at amusement which otherwise 
would not amuse. Dp not believe it. La Vie 
Parisienne, it is true, is certainly not a paper for 
the English family. I should be embarrassed if my 
respected aunts found it on my table, pointed to 
its drawings, and asked me what I saw in them. 
What makes it popular with young Englishmen 
in France is not the audacity of its abbreviated 
underclothing, for there are English prints which 
specialize in those in a more leering way, and 
they are not widely popular like the French print. 
But La Vie is produced by intelligent men. It is 

[46] 



Magazines 

not a heavy lump of stupid or snobbish photo- 
graphs. It does not leer. There is nothing 
clownish and furtive about it. It is the gay and 
frank expression of artists whose humour is too 
broad for the general; but, as a rule, there is no 
doubt about the fine quality of their drawings and 
the deftness of their wit. That is what makes 
the French print so liked by our men. 

New York Life proves that, it seems to me. 
The American periodical is very popular in 
France, and the demand for it has now reached 
London. The chemise is not its oriflamme. It 
properly recognizes much else in life. But its 
usual survey of the world's affairs has a merry 
expansiveness which would make the editorial 
mind common to London as giddy as grandma 
in an aeroplane. It is not written in a walled 
enclosure of ideas. It is not darkened and cir- 
cumscribed by the dusty notions of the clubs. It 
does not draw poor people as sub-species of the 
human. It does not recognize class distinctions 
at all, except for comic purposes. It is brighter, 
better-informed, bolder, and more humane than 
anything on this side, and our men in France find 
its spirit in accord with theirs. One of the results 
of the War will be that they will want something 
like it when they come back, though I don't see 

[47] 



Waiting for Daylight 

how they are to get it unless it is imported, or 
unless they emigrate to a country where to feel 
that way about things is normal and not peculiar. 



[48] 



IX. TheMarne 

AUGUST 3, 19 1 8. The holy angels 
were at Mons; British soldiers saw 
them there. A Russian army was in 
England in 19 14; everybody knew someone who 
had seen it. And Joan of Arc, in shining armour, 
has returned to the aid of the French. These 
and even graver symptoms warn us that we may 
not be in that state of equanimity which is useful 
when examining evidence. Only this week, in the 
significant absence of the house-dog, a mysterious 
hand thrust through my letter-box a document 
which proved, as only propaganda may, that this 
war was thoroughly explored in the Book of 
Daniel. Why were we not told so before? 
Why was Lord Haldane reading Hegel when 
there was Daniel? What did we pay him for? 
And that very same night I stood at the outer 
gate with one who asked me why, when there 
were stacks of jam in our grocer's shop, we could 
not buy any because the Food Controller had 
omitted to put up the price. I had no time to 
reason this out, because at that moment we heard 

[49] 



Waiting for Daylight 

a loud buzzing in the sky. We gazed up into the 
velvet black night, that was like a skull-cap over 
the world. The buzzing continued. "Perhaps," 
said my companion, "what we can hear is our 
great big Bee." 

That buzzing overhead did not develop. It 
merely waned and increased. It was remarkable 
but inconsequential. It alarmed while giving no 
good cause for alarm. In the invisible heavens 
there might have been One who was playing 
Bogie to frighten poor mortals for fun. I went 
in to continue my reading of Charles le Goffic's 
book, General Foch at the Maine. This was all 
in accord with the Book of Daniel, and the jam 
that was uneatable because it was not dear enough. 
My reading continued, as it were, the mysterious 
buzzing. 

I can give, as a rule, but a slack attention to 
military history, and my interest in war itself is, 
fundamentally, the same as for cretinism and bad 
drains. I merely wonder why it is, and wish it 
were not. But the Marne, I regret to say, holds 
me in wonder still; for this there is nothing to 
say excepting that, from near Meaux, I heard 
the guns of the Marne. I saw some of its pomp 
and circumstance. I had been hearing the guns 
of the War for some weeks then, but the guns 

[JO] 



The Marne 

of the Marne were different. They who listened 
knew that those foreboding sounds were of the 
crisis, with all its import. If that thundering 
drew nearer . . . 

The Marne holds me still, as would a ghost 
story which, by chance, had me within its weird. 
I want to know all that can be told of it. And 
if there is one subject of the War more than 
another which needs a careful sorting of the 
mixed straws In our beards, it is the Battle of the 
Marne. In the case of my own beard, one of 
the straws is the Russian myth. In France, as 
in England, everybody knew someone who had 
seen those Russians. One huge camp, I was told, 
was near Chartres, and in Paris I was shown 
Cossack caps which had come from there. That 
was on the day Manoury's soldiers went east 
in their historic sortie of taxicabs against von 
Kluck. I could not then go to Chartres to con- 
firm that camp of Cossacks; nor — and this is my 
straw — could the German Intelligence Staff. I 
did not believe that the Russians were in France, 
but I could not prove they were not, nor could 
the German generals, who, naturally, had heard 
about those Russians. Now the rapid sweep of 
the German right wing under von Kluck had 
given the enemy a vulnerable flank which, in a 

[51] 



Waiting for Daylight 

certain situation, might admit disaster. The 
peril of his western flank must have made the 
enemy sensitive to the least draught coming from 
there. 

It is on such frailties as this that the issue of 
battle depends, and the fate of empires. War, 
as a means of deciding our luck, is no more scien- 
tific than dicing for it. The first battle of the 
Marne holds a mystery which will intrigue 
historians, separate friends, cause hot debate, 
spawn learned treatises, help to fill the libraries, 
and assist in keeping not a few asylums occupied, 
for ages. If you would measure it as a cause 
for lunacy, read Belloc's convincing exposition 
of the battle, and compare that with le Gofiic's 
story of the fighting of the Ninth Army, under 
General Foch, by Fere Champenoise and the 
Marshes of St. Gond. Le Goffic was there. 

Why did fate tip the beam in the way we 
know? Why, for a wonder, did the sound of 
gunfire recede from Paris, and not approach still 
nearer? I myself at the time held to an unrea- 
sonable faith that the enemy would never enter 
Paris, in spite of what Kitchener thought and 
the French Government feared. Yet when 
challenged I could not explain why, for I was 
ill, and the days seemed to be biassed to the Ger- 

[52] 



The Marne 

man side. To have heard the guns of the Marne 
was as though once one had listened to the high 
gods contending over our destiny. 

Historians of the future will spell out le Goffic 
on the fighting round the Tower on the Marshes 
at Mondement. It was the key of the swamp of 
St. Gond, the French centre. The Tower was 
held by the French when, by every military rule, 
they should have given it up. At length they 
lost it. They won it again, but because of sheer 
unreason, so far as the evidence shows, for at 
the moment they regained it Mondement had 
ceased to be anything but a key to a door which 
had been burst wide open. Foch, by the books, 
was beaten. But Foch as we know was fond 
of quoting Joseph de Maistre: "A battle lost 
is a battle which one had expected to lose." In 
this faith, while his battalions were reduced to 
thin companies without officers, and the Prussian 
Guard and the Saxons v/ere driving back his whole 
line, Foch, who had sent to borrow the 42nd Divi- 
sion from the general on his left, kept reporting 
to Headquarters: "The situation is excellent." 
But the 42nd had not yet arrived, and he con- 
tinued to retire. 

Contradicting Belloc and the usual explana- 
tions, M. le Goffic says that Foch was unaware 

[S3] 



Waiting for Daylight 

of any gap in the German line. What he did 
was to thrust in a bleak venture the borrowed 
division against the flank of the advancing Prus- 
sians, who were in superior force. The Prus- 
sians retired. But had they not been preparing 
to retire? Yet for what reason? When all 
seemed lost, Foch won on the centre. 

On the extreme French left, where Manoury 
was himself being outflanked by von Kluck, the 
fatigued and outnumbered French soldiers were 
resigned to the worst. They had done all that 
was possible, and it seemed of no avail. They 
did not know that at that time the locomotives 
in the rear of the German armies were reversed; 
were heading to the north. What happened 
in the minds of the directing German generals — 
for that is where the defeat began — is not clear; 
but the sudden and prolonged resistance of the 
French at the Marne may have disrupted with 
a violent doubt minds that had been taut with 
over-confidence. The fear to which the doubt in- 
creased when Manoury attacked and persisted, 
the baffling audacity in the centre of the defeated 
Foch, who did everything no well-bred militarist 
would expect from another gentleman, and the 
common fervour of the French soldiers who 
fought for a week like men possessed, at last 

[S4] 



The Marne 

caused something to give way in the brain of the 
enemy. He could not understand it. This was 
not according to his plan. He could not find it 
in his books. He did not know what more he 
could do, except to retire Into safety and think 
it over afresh. The unexpected fury of the 
human spirit, outraged into desperation after it 
was assumed to be subdued, and bursting sud- 
denly, and regardless of consequences, against the 
calm and haughty front of material science 
assured of its power, checked and deflected the 
processes of the German intelligence. I have 
seen an indignant rooster produce the same effect 
on a bull. 



[ss] 



X. Carlyle 



AUGUST 17, 191 8. Having something 
on the mind may lead one to salva- 
tion, but it seems just as likely to lead 
one to the asylum. The Germans, who are nec- 
essarily in the power of an argument which shows 
them we are devils, are yet compelled to admit 
that Shakespeare is worth reasoned consideration, 
and so they avoid the implied difficulty by explain- 
ing that as Shakespeare was a genius therefore 
he was a German. What we should do if it could 
be proved a grandfather of the poet was a 
Prussian probably only our Home Secretary 
could tell us, after he had made quite sure 
he would not be overheard by a white and tense 
believer in the Hidden Hand. Thank God 
Heine was a Jew, though even so there are 
rumours that a London memorial to him is to 
be removed. And last night I heard it expounded 
very seriously, by a clever man of letters, that 
Carlyle's day is done. Few people read Carlyle 
to-day — and it may be supposed that as they read 
they hold his volumes with a Hidden Hand — 

[56] 



Carlyle 

and fewer still love him, for at heart he was a 
Prussian. He was, indeed, slain in our affections 
by Frederick the Great. His shrine at Chelsea is 
no longer visited. It is all for the best, because 
in any case he wrote only a gnarled and involved 
bastard stuff of partly Teutonic origin. While 
this appeal was being made to me, I watched the 
face of a cat, which got up and stretched itself 
during the discourse;, with some hope; but that 
animal looked as though it were thinking of its 
drowned kittens. It was the last chance, and the 
cat did not laugh. On my way home, thinking 
of that grave man of letters and of his serious 
and attentive listeners, I noticed even the street 
lights were lowered or doused, and remem- 
bered that every wine-shop was shut. London 
is enough to break one's heart. If only by some 
carelessness one of the angels failed to smother 
his great laughter over us, and we heard it, 
we might, in awakening embarrassment, the first 
streak of dawn, put a stop to what had been until 
that moment an unconscious performance. 



[57] 



XL Holiday Reading 

AUGUST 31, 19 1 8. I make the same 
mistake whenever the chance of a holi- 
day broadens and brightens. A small 
library, reduced by a process of natural selection, 
helps to make weighty the bag. But I do not at 
once close the bag; a doubt keeps it open; I take 
out the books again and consider them. When 
the problem of carrying those volumes about faces 
me, it is a relief to discover how many of them 
lose their vital importance. Yet a depraved 
sense of duty, perhaps the residue of what such 
writers as Marcus Aurelius have done for me, 
refuses to allow every volume to be jettisoned. 
It imposes, as a hair shirt, several new and serious 
books which there has been no time to examine. 
They are books that require a close focus, a long 
and steady concentration, a silent immobility 
hardly distinguishable from sleep. This year 
for instance I notice Jung's Analytical Psychol- 
ogy confidently expecting to go for a holiday with 
me. I feel I ought to take some such stem re- 
minder of mortality, and, in addition, out of a 

[58] 



Holiday Reading 

sentimental regard for the past, a few old books, 
for my faith is not dead that they may put a new 
light on the wonderful strangeness of these latter 
days. I take these, too. 

And that is why I find them at the journey's 
end. But why did I bring them? For now they 
seem to be exactly what I would avoid — they look 
like toil. And work, as these years have taught 
the observant, is but for slaves and the con- 
scripted. It is never admired, except with a dis- 
tant and haughty sententiousness, by the best 
people. 

Nor is it easy, by this west-country quay, to 
profit by a conscience which is willing to allow 
some shameless idleness. I began talking, before 
the books were even unpacked, with some old ac- 
quaintances by the water-side. Most disquiet- 
ing souls! But I cannot blame them. They 
have been obliged to add gunnery to their knowl- 
edge of seamanship and navigation. They were 
silent, they shook their heads, following some 
thoughtless enquiries of mine after the wellbeing 
of other men I used to meet here. Worse than 
all, I was forced to listen to the quiet recitals of 
stranded cripples, once good craftsmen in the 
place, and these dimmed the blessed sun even 
where in other years it was unusually bright. 

[59] 



Waiting for Daylight 

That is what put holiday thoughts and literature 
away. I felt I had been very unfairly treated, 
especially as the mutilated, being young men, were 
unpleasantly noticeable In so small a village on 
fine mornings. It is not right that the calm of 
our well-earned leisure should be so savagely 
ruined. There was one morning on the quay 
when, watching the incoming tide, two of us were 
discussing Mametz Wood and some matters relat- 
ing to It which will never be published, and the 
young man who was instructing me was ap- 
proached by an older man, who beamed, and held 
in his hand a news-sheet. "Splendid news this 
morning," said the elderly man to the young sol- 
dier. He wanted the opinion of one who had 
fought on that ground, and I regret to say he got 
it. The soldier indifferently handed back, the 
glorious news, without Inspecting It, with words 
which youth should never address to age. 

So how can I stay by the quay all the golden 
day long? I have not come here prepared to 
endure the sudden Arctic shadows which fall, even 
in summer, from such clouds. The society of 
our fellows was never so uncertain, so likely to be 
stormy, as in these days. And the opinions of 
none of our fellow-men can be so disturbing as 
those of the rebel from the trenches, who appears, 

[60] 



Holiday Reading 

too, to expect us to agree with him at once, as 
though he had a special claim on our sympa- 
thetic attention. While considering him and his 
views of society, of peace and war, I see what 
might come upon us as the logical consequence of 
such a philosophy, and the dread vision does not 
accord with the high serenity of this Atlantic 
coast, where the wind, like the hilarious vivacity 
of a luminous globe spinning through the blue, 
is mocking these very sheets as I write them, 
and is trying to blow them, a little before their 
time, into vacuity. 

It is not easy, and perhaps this summer it would 
not be right, to find the exact mood for a holi- 
day. In the frame of mind which is more usual 
with us, I put Ecclesiastes — forsaken by a previ- 
ous visitor, and used to lengthen a short leg 
of the dressing-table — in my pocket, and leave 
the quay to its harsh new thoughts, and to the 
devices by which it gets a bare sustenance out 
of the tides, the seasons, and the winds, compli- 
cated now with high explosives in cunning am- 
bush; and go out to the headland, where wild 
goats among the rocks which litter the steep are 
the only life to blatter critical comment to high 
heaven. I left that holiday quay and its folk, 
and took with me a prayer which might go far 

[6i] 



Waiting for Daylight 

to brace me to support the blattering of goats, 
if that, too, should be my luck even when in soli- 
tude. I passed at the hill-top the last white- 
washed wall of the village, where the open At- 
lantic is sighted, and stopped to glance at the 
latest official poster on the wall. That explained 
to me, while the west wind blew, what the penal- 
ties are for young men who are in the wrong 
because they are young, not having attained the 
middle-age which brings with it immunity for 
the holding of heroic notions. Yet how if 
those young men arc not bellicose like their wise 
seniors? Why should they get the evil which 
their elders, who will it, take so much care to 
avoid? 

The dust of official lorries in a hurry no longer 
made the wayside hedges appear aged. The 
wind was newly arrived from mid-ocean. I met 
it coming ashore. It knew nothing about us, so 
far. In the distance, the village with its shipping 
was a faint blur, already a faded impress on 
earth, as though more than half forgotten in 
spite of its important problems. It was hardly 
more than a discoloration, and suggested noth- 
ing of consequence. The sun on the grey rocks 
was giving a hint that, should ever it be required, 

[62] 



Holiday Reading 

there was heat enough left to begin things anetw. 
I realized in alarm that such a morning of re-birth 
might be beautiful; for I might not be there to 
sing Laus Deo. I might miss that fine morn- 
ing. There was a suggestion of leisure in the 
pattern of the lichen on the granite; it gave the 
idea of prolonged yet still merely tentative efforts 
at design. The lichen seemed to have complete 
assurance that there was time enough for new 
work. The tough stems of the heather, into 
which I put my hand, felt like the sinews of a 
body that was as ancient as the other stars, but 
still so young that it was tranquilly fixed in the 
joy of its first awakening, knowing very little yet, 
guessing nothing of its beginning nor of its end; 
still Infantile, with all life before It, Its voice 
merely the tiny shrilling of a grasshopper. The 
rocks were poised so precariously above the quiv- 
ering plain of the sea that they appeared to trem- 
ble in mId-aIr, being things of no weight, in the 
rush of the planet. The distant headlands and 
moors dilated under the generating sun. It was 
then that I pulled Ecclesiastes out of my pocket, 
leaned against the granite, and began: 

"Vanity of vanities . . ." 

I looked up again. There was a voice above 

[63] 



Waiting for Daylight 

me. An old goat, the venerable image of all- 
knowledge, of sneering and bearded sin, was con- 
templating me. It was a critical comment of his 
that I had heard. Embarrassed, I put away my 
book. 



[64] 



XII. An Autumn Morning 

SEPTEMBER 28, 19 18. The way to my 
suburban station and the morning train 
admonishes me sadly with its stream of 
season-ticket holders carrying dispatch-cases, and 
all of them anxious, their resolute pace makes it 
evident, for work. This morning two aero- 
planes were over us in the blue, in mimic com- 
bat; they were, of course, getting into trim for 
the raid to-night, because the barometer is beau- 
tifully high and steady. But the people on their 
way to the 9.30 did not look up at the flight. 
Life is real, life is earnest. When I doubt that 
humanity knows what it is doing, I get comfort 
from watching our local brigadiers and Whitehall 
ladies on their way these tranquil Autumn 
mornings to give our planet another good shove 
towards the millennium. Progress, progress! 
I hear their feet overtaking me, brisk and reso- 
lute, as though a revelation had come to them 
overnight, and so now they know what to do, un- 
diverted by any doubt. There is a brief glimpse 
of a downcast face looking as though it had just 

[65] 



Waiting for Daylight 

chanted the Dies Ira? through the mouthfuls of 
a hurried breakfast; and once more this laggard 
is passed in the day's race towards the higher 
peak. The reproof goes home. It justly humil- 
iates. But the weather is only a little west of 
south for one of the last fair days of the year; 
and the gloom of the yew in the churchyard — 
which stands over the obscure headstone of a 
man named Puplett — that yew which seems the 
residue of the dark past, has its antiquity full 
of little smouldering embers of new life 
again; and so a lazy man has reasons to doubt 
whether the millennium is worth all this hurry. 
As it is, we seem to have as much trouble as there 
is time to classify before supper; by which time, 
from the look of the weather, there will be more. 
Then why hurry over it? The tombstone says 
Puplett was a "thrifty and industrious parent," 
and I can see what happened to him in 1727. 
What would I not give, I ask myself, as I pause 
by the yew, and listen to the aeroplanes overhead, 
for a few words from this Puplett on thrift, in- 
dustry, and progress ! Does he now know more 
than brigadiers? 

It may be that what Europe is suffering from 
in our time is the consequence of having worked 
too hard, since that unlucky day when Watt gave 

[66] 



An Autumn Morning 

too much thought to a boiling kettle. We have 
worked too hard without knowing why we were 
doing it, or what our work would do with us. We 
were never wise enough to loaf properly, to stop 
and glance casually around for our bearings. We 
went blindly on. Consider the newspapers, as 
they are now! A casual inspection of the mix- 
ture of their hard and congested sentences is 
enough to show that what is wanted by our wri- 
ters famous for their virility, their power of 
"graphic description" as their outpour is called 
by their disciples, and their knowledge of what 
everybody ought to be doing, is perhaps no more 
than an occasional bromide. They would feel 
better for a long sleep. This direction by them 
of our destiny is an intoxicating pursuit, but it is 
as exhausting as would be any other indulgence. 
We might do quite well if they would only leave 
it to us. But they will never believe it. Ah ! the 
Great Men of Action! What the world has 
suffered from their inspired efforts to shepherd 
humanity into worried flocks hurrying nobody 
knew whither, every schoolboy reads; and our 
strong men to-day, without whose names and por- 
traits no periodical is considered attractive, 
would surely have been of greater benefit to us if 
they had remained absorbed in their earlier 

[67] 



Waiting for Daylight 

skittles. If the famous magician, who, with sev- 
eral others, Is winning the war by suggestion, and 
that true soldier, General FItzChutney, and that 
earnest and eloquent publicist, Mr. Blufflerlow, 
had been persuaded to stick to marbles, what mis- 
leading excitement and unprofitable anxiety 
would have been spared to the commonweal! 
Boys should be warned against and protected from 
Great Careers. Better still if embryologists 
could discover something which would enable mid- 
wives unfailingly to recognize Strong Men at 
birth. It would be easy then to issue to those 
ladies secret but specific instructions. 

There Is a street which turns abruptly from 
my straight road to the station. It goes like a 
sudden resolution to get out of this daily hurry 
and excitement. It Is a pre-war street. It Is an 
ancient thoroughfare of ours, a rambling and un- 
frequented by-way. It Is more than four years 
since it was a habit of mine to loiter through it, 
with a man with whom I shall do no more pleasant 
idling. Wc enjoyed Its old and ruinous shops 
and its stalls, where all things could be bought at 
second-hand, excepting young doves, ferrets, and 
dogs. I saw It again this morning, and felt, some- 
how, that It was the first time I had noticed It 
since the world suddenly changed. Where had it 

[68] 



An Autumn Morning 

been in the meantime? It was empty this morn- 
ing, it was still, it was luminous. It might have 
been waiting, a place that was, for the return of 
what can never return. Its sunlight was different 
from the glare in the hurrying road to the station. 
It was the apparition of a light which has gone 
out. I stopped, and was a little fearful. Was 
that street really there? I thought its illumina- 
tion might be a ghostly sunlight haunting an av- 
enue leading only to the nowhere of the memory. 
Did the others who were passing see that by-way? 
I do not think so. They never paused. They 
did not glance sideways in surprise, stare in an 
expectancy which changed almost at once into 
regret for what was good, but is not. 

Who would not retire into the near past, and 
stay there, if it were possible? (What a weak- 
ness!) Retrospection was once a way of escape 
for those who had not the vitality to face their 
own fine day with its exacting demands. Yet 
who now can look squarely at the present, except 
officials, armament shareholders, and those in per- 
ambulators? This side-turning offered me a 
chance to dodge the calendar and enter the light 
of day not ours. The morning train of the day I 
saw in that street went before the War. I 
decided to lose it, and visit the shop at the top 

[69] 



V 



Waiting for Daylight 

of the street, where once you could buy anything 
from a toddy glass to an emu's egg having a 
cameo on it of a ship in full sail. It was also a 
second-hand bookshop. Most lovers of such 
books would have despised it. It was of little 
use to go there for valuable editions, or even for 
such works as Sowerby's Botany. But when last 
the other man and myself rummaged in it we 
found the first volume of the Boy's Own Paper, 
and an excellent lens for our landscape camera. 
An alligator, sadly in need of upholstering, stood 
at the door, holding old umbrellas and walking- 
sticks in its arms. The proprietor, with a sombre 
nature and a black beard so like the established 
shadows of his lumbered premises that he could 
have been overlooked for part of the unsalable 
stock, read Swedenborg, Plato, Plutarch, and 
Young's Night Thoughts — the latter an edition 
of the eighteenth century in which an Edinburgh 
parson had made frail marginal comments, 
yellow and barely discernible, such as: "How 
True !" This dealer in lumber read through 
large goggles, and when he had decided to admit 
he knew you were in his shop he bent his head, 
and questioned you steadily but without a word 
over the top of his spectacles. If you showed no 

[70] 



An Autumn Morning 

real interest in wliat you proposed to buy he 
would refuse to sell it. 

There I found him again, still reading — Swe- 
denborg this time — with most of the old things 
about him, including the Duck-billed Platypus; for 
nobody, apparently, had shown sufficient In- 
terest in them. The shop, therefore, was as I 
have always known it. There was a spark of a 
summer's day of 19 14 still burning in the heart of 
a necromancer's crystal ball on the upper shelf 
by the window. 

The curio there which was really animated 
put down his book after I had been in the shop 
for some minutes, regarded me deliberately as 
though looking to see what change had come to 
me in four such years, and then glanced up and 
nodded to the soothsayer's crystal. "It's a pity," 
he said, "that those things won't really work." 
He asked no questions. He did not inquire after 
my friend. He did not refer to those problems 
which the crowds in the morning trains were 
eagerly discussing at that moment. He sat on a 
heap of forgotten magazines, and remained apart 
with Swedcnborg. I loafed in the fertile dust and 
quiet among old prints, geological specimens, 
antlers, pewter, bed-warmers, amphorae, and 

[71] 



Waiting for Daylight 

books. The proprietor presided over the dim 
litter of his world, bowed, pensive, and silent, 
suggesting in his aloofness not indifference but a 
retired sadness for those for whom the mysteries 
could be made plain, but who are wilful in their 
blindness, and so cannot be helped. 

I came upon a copy of IValden, in its earliest 
Camelot dress (price sixpence), and remembered 
that one who was not there had once said he was 
looking for it in that edition. I turned to the last 
page and read: "Only that day dawns to which 
we are awake . . ." 

I reserved the book for him at once, though 
knowing I could not give it to him. But what is 
the good of cold reason? Are we awake in such 
dawns as we now witness? Or has there been 
no dawn yet because we are only restless in our 
sleep? It might be either way, and in such a per- 
plexity reason cannot help us. I thought that 
perhaps I might now be stirring, on the point 
of actually rousing. There, in any case, was the 
evidence of that fugitive spark of the early sum- 
mer of 19 14 still imprisoned in its crystal, proof 
that the world had experienced a dawn or two. 
An entirely unreasonable serenity possessed me 
— perhaps because I was not fully roused — ^be- 
cause of the indestructibility of those few voiceless 

[72] 



An Autumn Morning 

hopes we cherish that seem as fugitive as the 
glint in the crystal ball, hopes without which our 
existence would have no meaning, for if we lost 
them we should know the universe was a witless 
jest, with nobody to laugh at it. 

"I want this book," I said to the shopman. 

"I know," he answered, without looking up. 
"I've kept it for you." 



[73] 



XIII. News from the Front 

OCTOBER 12, 1918. My remembrance 
of the man, when I got his letter from 
France — and it was approved, appar- 
ently, by one of his regimental officers, for a cen- 
sorial signature was upon its envelope — was a 
regrettable and embarrassing check to my im- 
pulse to cry Victory. I found it hard, neverthe- 
less, in the moment when victory was near, to for- 
give the curious lapse that letter betrayed in a 
fellow who did not try for exemption but volun- 
teered for the infantry, and afterwards declined 
a post which would have saved him from the 
trenches. He was the sort of curious soldier 
that we civilians will never understand. He 
aided the enemy he was fighting. His platoon 
officer reported that fact as characteristic and ad- 
mirable. He had gone out under fire to hold up 
a wounded German and give him water. He did 
not die then, but soon after, on the Hindenburg 
Line, because, chosen as a good man who was ex- 

[74] 



News from the Front 

pert in killing others with a deadly mechanism, he 
was leading in an attack. This last letter of his, 
which arrived after the telegram warning us, in 
effect, that there could be no more correspondence 
with him, alluded in contempt to his noble pro- 
fession and task, and ended with a quotation from 
Drum Taps which he prayed I would understand. 
His prayer was in vain. I did not understand. 
I read that quotation at breakfast, just after 
finishing my fierce and terrible Daily Dustpan, 
and the quotation, therefore, was at once repug- 
nant and unfortunate. For clearly the leader- 
writer of the Dustpan was a bolder and more 
martial man. It is but fair to assume, however, 
that as that journalist in the normal routine of a 
day devoted to his country had not had the good 
fortune to run up against the machine guns of the 
Hindenburg trenches, naturally he was better 
able to speak than a soldier who was idly swing- 
ing in the wire there. The quotation, strange for 
a Guardsman to make, is worth examining as an 
example of the baleful influence war has upon 
those who must do the fighting which journalists 
have the hard fate merely to indicate is the duty 
of others. The verse actually is called Recon- 
ciliation. After a partial recovery from the 
shame of the revelation of my correspondent's 

[75] 



Waiting for Daylight 

unsoldlerly spirit, a shame which was a little 
softened by the thought that anyhow he was dead, 
I went to Leaves of Grass for the first time for 
some years, to see whether Drum Taps accorded 
with war as we know it. 

And now I am forced to confess that we may 
no longer accuse the Americans of coming late 
into the War. They appear to have been in it, 
if the date of Drum Taps is ignored, longer even 
than Fleet Street. I cannot see that we have 
contributed anything out of our experiences of 
battle which can compare with Whitman's poems. 
He appears to have known of war in essential 
episodes and incidents, as well as from a high 
vision of it, in a measure which the literature of 
our own tragedy does not compass. 

A minor poet told me once that he could not 
read Whitman. He declared it was like chewing 
glass. When we criticize others, the instant pen- 
alty is that we unwittingly confess what we are 
ourselves. We know the reception of Leaves of 
Grass was of the kind which not seldom greets 
the appearance of an exceptional book, though 
Emerson recognized its worth. So when occa- 
sionally we admit, shyly and apologetically, as 
is our habit (in the way we confess that once we 
enjoyed sugar candy), that long ago we used to 

[76] 



News from the Front 

read Emerson, It would do our superior culture 
no harm to remember that Emerson was at least 
the first of the world of letters to tell the new poet 
that his Leaves was "the most extraordinary piece 
of wit and wisdom America has yet produced." 
Nothing in all his writing proves the quality of 
Emerson's mind so well as his instant and full 
knowledge of Whitman, when others felt that 
what Whitman was really inviting was laughter 
and abuse. I suppose what the young poet meant 
when he said reading Whitman was like a mouth- 
ful of glass was that Whitman has no music, and 
so cannot be read aloud. There is always a fair 
quantity of any poet's work which would do much 
to make this world a cold and unfriendly place 
if v/e persevered in reading it aloud. In some 
circumstances even Shakespeare might cause 
blasphemy. Perhaps he has. And Whitman, 
like summer-time, and all of us, is not always at 
his best. But I think it is possible that many 
people to-day will know the music and the solace 
of the great dirge beginning "When lilacs last in 
the dooryard bloom'd." And again, if capturing 
with words those surmises which intermittently 
and faintly show in the darkness of our specula- 
tions and are at once gone, if the making of a 
fixed star of such wayward glints is the mark of 

[77] 



Waiting for Daylight 

a poet, then Whitman gave us "On the beach at 
night." 

I had never thought Whitman so good till that 
soldier's letter accidentally discovered it to me. 
If Whitman had been through the campaign 
across the narrow straits, if Ypres, Vimy, and 
Cambrai had been in his own experience, he could 
have added little to Drum Taps. For there is 
nothing that is new in war. It is only the cam- 
paign that is new, and the men who are young. 
Yet all has happened before. But each young 
soldier in a new campaign feels that his experience 
is strangely personal. He will have the truth re- 
vealed to him, and will think that it is an intimacy 
for his soul alone; yet others, too, have seen it, 
but are dead. The survivors of this War will 
imagine their experiences unique, admonitory, 
terrible, and that if they had the words to tell 
us their knowledge they would not be believed or 
understood. That is why the succeeding genera- 
tion, too, gets caught. Yet there is enough of 
this War in Drum Taps to have stopped it more 
than two years ago if only one European in ten 
had had so much imagination and enterprise as 
would take a man through a strange field gate 
when he was convinced it was in that direction he 

[78] 



News from the Front 

should go, and enough of charity in his heart to 
stay him from throwing stones at the sheep while 
on his way. 



[79] 



XIV. Authors and Soldiers 

OCTOBER 26, 1918. If a man who 
knew no books, but who became serious 
when told of his emptiness, and showed 
eagerness to begin to fill it, were confronted with 
the awful strata in the library of the British 
Museum, and were told that that was his task, 
he might fall unconscious. But what cruelty! 
He could be warned that the threat has little in 
it; that the massed legions of books could do him 
no harm, if he did not disturb them. It could 
be whispered to the illiterate man — whose wis- 
dom, it might chance, was better than much schol- 
arship — that it is possible to read the best of 
the world's drama in a few months, and that in 
the remainder of the year he could read its finest 
poetry, history, and philosophy. I am but para- 
phrasing what was said recently by an Oxford 
professor. I would not dare to give it as my 
own opinion, within hearing of the high priests. 
Yet the professor's declaration may be not only 

[80] 



Authors and Soldiers 

outrageous, but right. It is a terrible thought, 
except to those who are merely bibliophiles just as 
some little boys are lovers of old postage stamps. 
J think he may be right, for I have a catalogue 
of all the books and documents prompted by the 
War and published before June, 191 6. It runs 
to 180 pages of small type. It contains the 
names of about 3500 books and pamphlets. 
Now, let us suppose a student wished to know 
the truth about the War, for perhaps a very 
youthful student could imagine it was possible to 
get the truth about it. The truth may be some- 
where in that catalogue; but I know, for I have 
tried, that it has no significant name to betray its 
pure gold, no strange brilliance to make the type 
dance on that page as one turns the leaves with 
a hopeless eye. There are, however, two cer- 
tainties about the catalogue. One is that it would 
require a long life, a buoyant disposition, and a 
freedom from domestic cares, to read every book 
in it. And the other is that there are no more 
books in it — which we ought to count as books 
— than one evening would see us through. 
Interruptions and all. The books in that mass 
are as dead as the leaves of their June of the 
War. 

I must confess, though, that I am a biblio- 

[81] 



Waiting for Daylight 

phile with War books. Any book about the 
Great War Is good enough for me. I am to 
that class of literature what little boys are to 
stamps. Yes; I know well the dread implica- 
tion. I am aware of the worm in the mind; 
that I probe a wound; that I surrender to an 
impulse to peer into the darkness of the pit; 
that I encourage a thought which steals in with 
the quiet of midnight, and that it keeps me 
awake while the household sleeps. I know 
I consort with ghosts in a region of evil. I get 
the horrors, and I do not repel them. For 
some reason I like those ghosts. Most of 
them have no names for me, but I count them 
as old friends of mine; and where should I 
meet them again, at night, but amid the scenes 
we knew? 

And what do I look for in these War books? 
It is not easy to say. It is a private matter. 
Songs the soldiers used to sing on French 
roads are often in my head. I am like the 
man who was once bewitched, and saw and heard 
things in another place which nobody will be- 
lieve, and who goes aside, therefore, unsociable 
and morose, to brood on what is not of this 
world. I am confessing this but to those who 
themselves have been lost in the dark, and are 

[82] 



Authors and Soldiers 

now awake again. The others will not know. 
They will only answer something about "Cheer- 
ing up," or — and this is the strangest thing to 
hear — "to forget it." I don't want to forget 
it. So if in a book I see names like Chateau 
Thierry, Crepy-en-Valois, Dickebusch, Hooge, 
Vermelles, Hulluch, Festubert, Notre Dame de 
Lorette, Ligny-Tilloy, Sailly-Saillisel, Croiselles, 
Thiepval, Contalmaison, Dompierre, then I am 
caught. I do not try to escape. 

Yet these books rarely satisfy me. Is it not 
remarkable that soldiers who could face the 
shells with an excellent imitation of indifference 
should falter in their books, intimidated by the 
opinions of those who stayed at home? They 
rarely summon the courage to attack those heroic 
dummies which are not soldiers but idols set up 
In a glorious battlefield that never existed ex- 
cept as a romance among the unimaginative; the 
fine figures and the splendid war that were air- 
built of a rapture. These authors who were 
soldiers faced the real War, but they dare not 
deride the noble and popular figments which 
lived but in the transports of the exalted. They 
write in whispers, as it were, embarrassed by a 
knowledge which they would communicate, but 
fear they may not. To shatter a cherished illu- 

[83] 



Waiting for Daylight 

sion, to expose the truth to a proud memory, 
that, I will confess, is always a task before 
which a sensitive man will hesitate. Yet it is 
also part of the test of a writer's courage; by 
his hesitation a soldier-author may know that he 
is in danger of failing in his duty. Yet the 
opinion of the public, which Intimidates us, is 
no mere bugbear. It is very serious. People 
do not enjoy the destruction of their cherished 
illusions. They do not crown the defamers of 
their idols. What is it that balks a soldier's 
judgment when he begins to write about the 
War? He is astonished by the reflection that 
if he were to reproduce with enjoyment the talk 
of the heroes which was usual In France, then 
many excellent ladies might denounce it Indig- 
nantly as unmanly. Unmanly! But he Is 
right. They not only might, but they would. 
How often have I listened to the cool and haughty 
contralto of ladies of education and refinement 
who were clearly unaware that what they were 
encouraging, what to them afforded so much 
pride, what deepened their conviction of 
righteous sacrifice, was but an obscene outrage 
on the souls and bodies of young men. How is 
one to convey that to ladies? All that a timid 
writer may do Is to regret the awful need to 

[84] 



Authors and Soldiers 

challenge the pious assurance of Christians which 
is sure to be turned to anger by the realities. 

I have read in very few books anything that was 
as good as the gossip one could hear by chance 
in France. The intimate yarn of the observant 
soldier home on leave, who could trust his 
listener, is superior to much one sees in print. 
In that way I heard the best story of the War. 
If it could be put down as it was given to me it 
would be a masterpiece. But it cannot be 
reproduced. It came as I heard it because, re- 
membering his incredible experience, the narrator 
found himself in secure and familiar circumstances 
again, was confident of his audience, and was 
thinking only of his story. His mind was re- 
leased, he was comfortable, and he was looking 
backward in a grim humour whith did not quite 
disguise his sadness. His smile was comical, 
but it could move no answering smile. These 
intelligent soldiers, who tell us the stories we 
never see in print, are not thinking about their 
style, or of the way the' other men have told 
such tales, but only of what happened to them- 
selves. They are as artless as the child who at 
breakfast so tells its dream of the night before 
that one wants to listen, and Tolstoy says that 
is art. The child has heard nothing of the 

[85] 



Waiting for Daylight 

apocalyptic visions, and does not know Poe, 
Ambrose Bierce, or Kipling. He is concerned 
only with his own sensations, and you listen to 
him because you have had such dreams, and he 
recalls a dark adventure you had forgotten. 

But the difficulty in the writing of such stories 
is that the narrator, as soon as he begins, be- 
comes conscious of the successful methods of 
other men. I have been reading a number of 
War stories published recently, and it was pain- 
ful to see how many were ruined by Kipling be- 
fore this War began. Kipling was original, 
and his tricks of manner, often irritating, and his 
deplorable views of human society, were usually 
carried off by his genius for observation, and the 
spontaneity of the drama of his stories. But 
when his story was thin, and he was wandering 
in an excursion with his childish philosophy, he 
was usually facetious. As an obvious and easily 
imitable trick for dull evenings, this elaborate 
jocularity seems to have been more enjoyed by 
his disciples than his genius for narrative when 
he was happy, and his material was full and 
sound. Yet his false and vulgar fun has spoiled 
many of these volumes pollinated from India. 
They have another defect, too, though it would 
be unfair to blame Kipling for that when it may 

[86] 



Authors and Soldiers 

be seen blossoming with the unassuming modesty 
of a tulip in any number of Punch. I mean that 
amusing gravity of the snob who is sure of the 
exclusive superiority of his caste mark, with not 
the trace of a smile on his face, and at a time 
when all Europe is awakening to the fact that it 
sentenced itself to ruin when it gave great 
privileges to his kind of folk in return for the 
guidance of what it thought was a finer culture, 
but was no more than a different accent. It was, 
we are now aware, the mere Nobodies who won 
the War for us; and yet we still meekly accept 
as the artistic representation of the British 
soldier or sailor an embarrassing guy that would 
disgrace pantomime. And how the men who 
won must enjoy it! 



[87] 



XV. Waiting for Daylight 

NOVEMBER 9, 1918. I read again my 
friend's last field service postcard, brief 
and enigmatic, and now six weeks old. 
I could find in it no more than when it first came. 
Midnight struck, and I went to the outer gate. 
The midnight had nothing to tell me. Not that 
it was silent; we would not call it mere silence, 
that brooding and impenetrable darkness 
charged with doom unrevealed, which is now 
our silent night, unrelenting to lonely watchers. 
Near my gate is a laburnum tree. Once upon 
a time, on nights of rain such as this, the shower 
caught in it would turn to stars, and somehow 
from the brightness of that transient constella- 
tion I could get my bearings. I knew where I 
was. One noticed those small matters in the 
past, and was innocently thankful for them. 
Those lights sufliced us. There was something 
companionable even in the street lamp. But 

[88] 



Waiting for Daylight 

what is it now? You see it, when you are ac- 
customed to the midnight gloom of war, 
shrouded, a funeral smear of purple in a black 
world. No bearing can be got from it now. 
What one looks into is the lightless unknown. 
I peer into the night and rain for some familiar 
and reasonable shape to loom — I am permitted 
to do this, for so far the police do not object to 
a citizen cherishing a hopeful though fatuous 
disposition — but my usual reward is but the 
sound of unseen drainage, as though I were 
listening to my old landmarks in dissolution. 
I feel I should not be surprised, when daylight 
came, to find that the appearance of my neigh- 
bourhood had become like Spitzbergen's. 

That is why I soon retreat now from my gate, 
no wiser, bringing in with me on these nights of 
rain little more than the certainty that we need 
expect no maroons or bombs; and then, because 
the act is most unpatriotic in a time of shortage, 
put on more coal with my fingers, as this makes 
less noise than a shovel. I choose a pipe, the 
one I bought in a hurry at Amiens. I choose 
it for that reason, and because It holds more to- 
bacco than the others; watch the flames, and take 
stock. 

In the winter, as we know, it never rains. 

[89] 



Waiting for Daylight 

It is merely wet weather. Still, that means only 
a retirement into winter quarters, into those long 
evenings against which we have hoarded our 
books, light and warmth in store. Perhaps in 
the case of the more idle there may be the con- 
sideration, pleasant and prolonged, of that other 
book, known to no other man, not yet written, 
and perhaps destined to perish, a secret dream. 
But what are now these books? What now is 
even that book which is perfect and unwritten? 
It, too, has lost its light. I am left staring into 
the fire. The newspapers tell us of a common 
joy at the coming of Peace. Peace? If she is 
coming, then we are much obliged to her. I re- 
member during an earlier and wasted joy at a 
word in France of the coming of Peace agreeing 
with several young soldiers that Brussels would 
be the place to meet, to hail there with flagons 
the arrival of the Dove. But I do not want to 
be reminded of what has happened since that 
day. That festival could now have but one 
celebrant. Then, in another year of the War, in 
a mood of contrition and dismay, some people 
began to feel that on the day Peace arrived it 
would be seemly If she found them on their knees 
in church. Since that day, too, much has hap- 
pened; and when Peace does come I suppose most 

[90] 



Waiting for Daylight 

of us will make reasonably certain the bird re- 
sembles a dove, and go to bed early — taking 
another look at the long-lost creature next morn- 
ing, in the presence of a competent witness, to 
confirm that we have not been deceived again by 
another turkey buzzard; and, if that is certain, 
then let the matter drop. 

For in these years, when heavy weather ob- 
scures the fixed lights, and we are not certain 
about our bearings, it is useless to pretend that 
the darkness which once made us content with 
a book is now a worse kind of darkness only be- 
cause intensified by a private shadow. The 
shadow of a personal grief does not wholly ex- 
plain its sinister intensity. The night itself is 
different. It hides a world unknown. If a sun 
is to rise on that world, then not even a false 
dawn yet shows. When we stand peering into 
our night, where the sound of rain and wind is 
like nothing the memory knows, and may be even 
the dark tumult portending a day of wrath, we 
may turn again in solitude to what is left to us, 
to our books; but not with quiet content. To- 
morrow we may pull ourselves together. Cu- 
riosity about our new world may awaken. We 
may become adventurous, and make an effort to- 
wards greeting the unknown with a cheer, to show 

[91] 



Waiting for Daylight 

it there is no settled ill-feeling. But it has been 
my experience that when leaving port in dark 
weather, though the voyage to come was to be 
novel and interesting, one heard very little cheer- 
ing from the glum figures working about the 
deck. The ship is sea-worthy, but she is bleak 
and foreign. In a week all will be well. We 
shall have cleared these icy latitudes. The sky 
will be fairer. We shall have more sun. We 
shall have become accustomed to our shipmates' 
unfamiliar faces and ways. It is only the start 
that is sullen and unpropitious. 

And here is Peace coming, and a new world, 
and there are my books; yet though this pipe after 
midnight is nearly done, and the fire too, I have 
not been able to settle on a book. The books are 
like the ashes on the hearth. And listen to the 
wind, with its unpromising sounds from the wide 
and empty desert places! What does any of 
these old books know about me, in the midst of 
those portents of a new age? We are all out- 
ward bound, and this is the first night of a long 
voyage, its port unknown. 

Even my bookshelves seem strange to-night. 
They look remarkably like a library I saw once 
in a house in Richbourg S. Vaast, which, you may 
remember, was a village near Neuve Chapelle. 

[92] 



Waiting for Daylight 

Those French volumes also survived from cir- 
cumstances that had passed. They were litter. 
They had been left behind. I doubted whether, 
if I tried, I could touch them. They were not 
within my time. That was on a day more than 
three years ago — it was July, 19 15 — and Rich- 
bourg had then only just left this world. There 
was a road without a sign of life; not a move- 
ment, except in one house. The front of that 
house had gone, exposing the hollow inside, the 
collapsed floors and hanging beams, and showing 
also a doll with a foolish smirk caught in a wire 
and dangling from a rafter. The doll danced in 
hysteric merriment whenever hidden guns were 
fired. That was the only movement in Rlch- 
bourg S. Vaast, and the guns made the only sound. 
I was a survivor from the past, venturing at peril 
among the wreckage and hardly remembered 
relics of what used to be familiar. Richbourg 
was possessed by the power which had over- 
whelmed it, and which was re-forming it in a 
changing world. To what was the world chang- 
ing? There was no clue, except the oppression of 
my mind, the shock of the guns, and the ecstatic 
mockery of mirth over ruin by that little idiot 
doll. 

Beyond the sloughing and leprous tower of 

[93] 



Waiting for Daylight 

Richbourg Church, where the ancient dead in 
the graveyard had been brought to light again, 
there was a house which seemed in being. I 
entered it, for I was told by a soldier companion 
that from a displaced tile in its roof I might see 
La Bassee. I looked through that gap, and saw 
La Bassee. It was very near. It was a terra- 
cotta smudge. It might have been a brickfield. 
But it was the Enemy. 

What I chiefly remember to-day is only the 
floor of that upper room from which, through a 
gap in its wall, I saw the ambush of the enemy. 
On the floor were scattered, mixed with lumps of 
plaster, a child's alphabetical blocks. A shoe 
of the child was among them. There was a 
window where we dared not show ourselves, 
though the day was fair without, and by it was 
an old bureau, open, with its pad of blotting- 
paper, and some letters, all smothered with frag- 
ments of glass and new dust. A few drawers 
of the desk were open, and the contents had been 
spilled. Round the walls of the room were book- 
cases with leaded diamond panes. Whoever was 
last in the room had left sections of the book- 
cases open, and there were gaps in the rows of 
books. Volumes had been taken out, had been 
dropped on the floor, put on the mantelpiece, or, 

[94] 



Waiting for Daylight 

as I had noticed when coming up to the room, 
left on the stairs. One volume, still open face 
upwards, was on the bureau. 

I barely glanced at those books. What could 
they tell me? What did they know about it? 
Just as they were, open on the floor, tumbled on 
the stairs, they were telling me all they could. 
Was there more to be said? Sitting on a bracket 
in the shadow of a corner, a little bust of 
Rousseau overlooked the scene with me. In such 
a place, at such a time, you must make your own 
interpretation of the change, receiving out of the 
silence, which is not altered in nature by occa- 
sional abominable noises, just whatever your mind 
wishes to take. There the books are, and the 
dust on them is of an era which abruptly fell; 
is still falling. 



[95] 



XVI. The Nobodies 

NOVEMBER II, 1918. The newspapers 
tell us that to-day the signal to "cease 
fire" will be given. This news is called 
^'Official," to give us assurance in the fog of myth. 
Maroons will explode above the City. Then we 
shall know it is the end of the War. We ought 
to believe it, because They tell us this; They who 
do everything for us — who order us what to think 
and how to act, arrange for our potatoes, settle 
the coming up and the going down of the sun, 
and who for years have been taking away our 
friends to make heroes of them, and worse. 
They have kept the War going, but now They are 
going to stop it. We shall know it is stopped 
when the rockets burst. 

Yet "The War" has become a lethargic state 
of mind for us. We accepted it from the be- 
ginning with green-fly, influenza, margarine, call- 
ing-up notices, and death. It is as much out- 

[96] 



The Nobodies 

side our control as the precession of the equi- 
noxes. We believed confidently in the tumultu- 
ous first weeks of the affair that mankind could 
not stand that strain for more than a few months; 
but we have learned it is possible to habituate 
humanity to the long elaboration of any folly, 
and for men to endure uncomplainingly racking by 
any cruelty that is devised by society, and for 
women to support any grief, however senselessly 
caused. Folly and cruelty become accepted as 
normal conditions of human existence. They 
continue superior to criticism, which is frequent 
enough though seldom overheard. The bitter 
mockery of the satirists, and even the groans of 
the victims, are unnoticed by genuine patriots. 
There seems no reason why those signal rockets 
should ever burst, no reason why the mornings 
which waken us to face an old dread, and the 
nights which contract about us like the strangle of 
despair, should ever end. We remember the 
friends we have lost, and cannot see why we 
should not share with them, in our turn, the pun- 
ishment imposed by solemn and approved de- 
mentia. Why should not the War go on till the 
earth in final victory turns to the moon the pock- 
scarred and pallid mask which the moon turns 
to us? 

[97] 



Waiting for Daylight 

I was looking, later this morning, at Charing 
Cross Bridge. It was, as usual, going south to 
the War. More than four years ago I crossed 
it on a memorable journey to France. It seemed 
no different to-day. It was still a Via Dolorosa 
projecting straight and black over a chasm. 
While I gazed at it, my mind in the past, a 
rocket exploded above it. Yes, I saw a burst 
of black smoke. The guns had ceasedj? 

A tug passing under the bridge began a con- 
tinuous hooting. Locomotives began to answer 
the tug deliriously. I could hear a low mutter- 
ing, the beginning of a tempest, the distant but 
increasing shouting of a great storm. Two men 
met in the thoroughfare below my outlook, waved 
their hats, and each cheered into the face of the 
other. 

Out in the street a stream of men and women 
poured from every door, and went to swell the 
main cataract which had risen suddenly in full 
flood in the Strand. The donkey-barrow of a 
costermonger passed me, loaded with a blue- 
jacket, a flower-girl, several soldiers, and a Staff 
captain whose spurred boots wagged joyously 
over the stern of the barrow. A motor cab fol- 
lowed, two Australian troopers on the roof of 
that, with a hospital nurse, her cap awry, sitting 

[98] 



The Nobodies 

across the knees of one of them. A girl on the 
kerb, continuously springing a rattle in a sort of 
trance, shrieked with laughter at the nurse. 
Lines of people with linked arms chanted and 
surged along, bare-headed, or with hats turned 
into jokes. A private car, a beautiful little 
saloon In which a lady was solitary, stopped near 
me, and the lady beckoned with a smile to a 
Canadian soldier who was close. He first stared 
in surprise at this fashionable stranger, and then 
got In beside her with obviously genuine alacrity. 
The hubbub swelled and rolled in Increasing de- 
lirium. Out of the upper windows of the Hotel 
Cecil, a headquarters of the Air Force, a con- 
fetti of official forms fell in spasmodic clouds. 
I returned soon to the empty room of an office 
where I was likely to be alone; because, now the 
War was over, while listening to the jollity of 
Peace which had just arrived, I could not get 
my thoughts home from France, and what they 
were I cannot tell. 

But there were some other memories, more 
easily borne. There was that night, for instance, 
late In the August of 19 14, when three of us were 
getting away from Creil. It was time to go. 
We were not soldiers. Lying on the floor of a 
railway carriage I tried to sleep, pillowed Invol- 

[99] 



Waiting for Daylight 

untarlly on someone's boot. I never knew to 
whom that foot belonged, for the compartment 
was chaos, like the world. The carriage light 
was feeble, and the faces I saw above me drooped 
under the glim, wilted and dingy. The eyes of 
the dishevelled were shut, and this traveller, 
counting the pulse of the wheels beneath, pres- 
ently forgot everything . . . there was a crash, 
and my heart bounded me to my feet. There 
had been a fortnight of excitements of this kind. 
A bag fell and struck me back to the floor. Un- 
seen people trampled over me, shouting. Some- 
body cried: "Here they are!" A cascade of 
passengers and luggage tumbled over to a sta- 
tion platform. 

It was a chilly morning. And where were 
we? A clock in a tower said it was five. Peo- 
ple hurried without apparent reason in all di- 
rections. So the world may appear to us if some 
day we find, to our surprise, that we have re- 
turned from the dead. I leaned against a lamp- 
post, my mind gravel-rashed, and waited for 
something that could be understood. The Ger- 
mans would do. We heard the enemy was close, 
and that the railway officials would get us away 
if they could. The morning became no warmer, 
there was no coffee, and our tobacco pouches were 

[lOO] 



The Nobodies 

empty. But at least we were favoured with the 
chance of watching the French railwaymen at 
work. This was a junction, and the men moved 
about as though they were only busy on holiday 
traffic. They were easy and deliberate. I could 
see they would hold that line to the last pull of 
cotton-waste, and would run their trains while 
there was a mile of track. So we learned grad- 
ually that confident invaders are baffled by rail- 
waymen and other common people, such as old 
women insistent on their cows, almost as much 
as they are by bayonets. A country's readiness 
for war may be slight, yet the settled habits of 
the peaceful Nobodies, which are not reckoned 
by Imperialists when they are calculating the 
length of the road to conquest, are strangely 
tough and obstinate. You could go to a girl at 
the pigeon-hole of a booking-office in France, 
demand a ticket for a place which by all the signs 
might then have fallen behind the van of the 
German Army, and she would hand the ticket 
to you as though she had never heard of the War. 
Then the engine-driver would go on towards the 
sound of the guns till you wondered, made un- 
easy by the signs without, whether he was phre- 
netic and intended to run the enemy down. The 
train would stop, and while the passengers 
[lOl] 



Waiting for Daylight 

were listening to the shells the guard would come 
along and give some advice as to the best thing 
to do. 

A little ahead of the Germans, a train came 
into that junction and took us away. I fell asleep 
again, and presently awoke to see a sombre or- 
chard outside my window of our stationary train. 
It was a group of trees entranced, like a scene 
before the stage is occupied. The grass in the 
twilight beneath the trees was rank. My sight 
fell drowsily to an abandoned kepi, and, while 
wondering what had become of the man who used 
to wear it, I saw a bright eye slyly shut at me. 
A wink in the grass ! A bearded face was laugh- 
ing up at me from under the kepi. A rifle with 
a fixed bayonet slid foward. Then I saw the 
orchard had a secret crop of eyes, which smiled 
at us from the ground. We moved on, and fare- 
well kisses were blown to us. 

Among the laurels of a garden beyond field 
batteries were in position. We crossed a bridge 
over a lower road and a stream. Infantry were 
waiting below for something, and from their atti- 
tudes seemed to expect it soon. My fellow-pas- 
sengers were now awake to these omens. Broad 
streams of cattle undulated past our train going 
south, but west. "My poor Paris!" exclaimed a 
[102] 



The Nobodies 

French lady. It was not for themselves these 
people were sorry. The common sort of people 
in the train were sorry for Paris, for all their 
unlucky fellows. The train moved with hesitancy 
for hours. During one long pause we listened 
to a cannonade. One burst of sound seemed 
very close. A young English girl, sitting in a 
corner with her infant, abruptly handed the child 
to her husband. She rummaged in a travelling 
case with the haste of incipient panic. She pro- 
duced a spirit-lamp, a bowl, and a tin. She had 
suddenly remembered it was past her baby's feed- 
ing time. 

Who won the War for us? It was such folk. 
They turned in docility, with no more than a 
pause, a pause of ignorance and wonder, of dis- 
may they could hardly conceal, from the accus- 
tomed order of their days to form vast armies, 
to populate innumerable factories for the making 
of munitions of war, and, while their households 
came everywhere to ruin, they held stubbornly 
to the task fate had thrust upon them; yet their 
august governors and popular guides, frantic and 
afraid through the dire retribution which had 
fallen on that monstrous European society which 
so many of us had thought eternal, abjured and 
abused the common sort whose efforts were all 
[103] 



Waiting for Daylight 

that could save us. What did they call the No- 
bodies? Slackers, cowards, rabbits, and field 
vermin; mean creatures unable to leave their foot- 
ball and their drink. I recall one sombre win- 
ter's day of the first November of the War, when 
a column of wounded Belgian soldiers shambled 
by me, coming out of the Yser line, on the way to 
succour which I knew they would not find. The 
doctors and the hospitals were few. These fel- 
lows were in rags which were plastered to their 
limbs with mud. Their eyes had the vacant look 
of men who had returned from the grave and who 
had forgotten this world. The bare feet of some 
of them left bloody trails on the road. Others 
clutched their bodies, and the blood drained be- 
tween their fingers. One dropped dead at my 
feet. I came home with that in my mind; and the 
next sunrise, hearing unusual sounds outside, I 
lifted the blind to a dawn which was cold and 
ominously scarlet behind skeleton trees. I saw 
beneath the trees a company of my young neigh- 
bours, already in khaki, getting used to the harsh- 
ness of sergeants, and to the routine of those 
implacable circumstances which would take them 
to Neuve Chapelle, to Gallipoli, to Loos, to the 
Somme; names that had no meaning for us then. 
That serious company of young Englishmen 
[104] 



The Nobodies 

making soldiers of themselves in a day with so 
unpropitious an opening light did not look like 
national indifference. Those innocents getting 
used to rifles were as affecting as that single line 
of bodies I saw across a mile of stubble near 
Compiegne, where a rearguard of the "Contempt- 
ibles" had sacrificed themselves to their com- 
rades. But one could not be sure. I went to 
find one who could tell me whether England 
was awake to what confronted it. I remembered 
he was a quiet observer, that he knew what allow- 
ance to make for those patriotic newspapers 
which so early were holding up in ruinous cari- 
cature their country and their countrymen for the 
world to see and to scorn. He was a scholar, 
he was a Socialist and a pacifist, he had a sense 
of humour to keep him balanced. But he had 
gone. He had enlisted; and he is dead. 

It was a common experience. From the day 
the Germans entered Belgium a dumb resolution 
settled on our Nobodies. They did not demon- 
strate. They made long silent queues at the 
recruiting offices. It is true those offices were 
not ready for them and turned them away; and 
when by sheer obstinacy they got into the Army 
they were put into concentration camps that were 
as deadly as battle. That did not daunt them, 

[105] 



Waiting for Daylight 

nor turn them from their purpose, whatever that 
was, for they never said; and the newspapers, by 
tradition, had no time to find out, being devoted 
to the words and activities of the Highly Impor- 
tant. We therefore knew nothing of the muni- 
tion factories that were springing up magically, as 
in a night, like toadstools, all over the country, 
and were barely aware that for some mysterious 
reason the hosts of the enemy were stopped dead 
on the road to Calais. Whose work was all 
this? But how should we know? Who can 
chronicle what Nobody does? 

Sometimes there was a hint. Once again, 
when I returned from France in 191 6, unhappy 
with a guess at what the future would be like, I 
learned that our workers were not working. 
They were drinking. They had been passion- 
ately denounced by the Great and Popular, and 
our Press was forced to admit this disastrous 
crime to the world, for fidelity to the truth is a 
national quality. I went to an engineer who 
would know the worst, and would not be afraid 
to tell me what it was. I found him asleep In 
his overalls, where he had dropped after thirty- 
six hours of continuous duty. Afterwards, when 
his blasphemous indignation over profiteers, 
politicians, and newspapers had worn itself out, 

[106] 



The Nobodies 

he told me. His men, using dimmed lights while 
working on the decks of urgent ships, often 
forced to work in cramped positions and in all 
weathers, and while the ship was under way to a 
loading berth, with no refreshment provided 
aboard, and dropped at any hour long distances 
from home, were still regarded by employers in 
the old way, not as defenders of their country's 
life, but as a means to quick profits, against 
whom the usual debasing tricks of economy could 
be devised. A battleship in the north had been 
completed five months under contract time. 
Working girls, determined to make a record out- 
put of ammunition, persisted twenty-two hours 
at a stretch, topped their machines with Union 
Jacks, and fainted next morning while waiting 
for the factory gates to open. The spirit of 
the English ! What virtue there is in bread and 
tea ! Yet we might have guessed it. And again 
we might have remembered, as a corrective, how 
many grave speeches, which have surprised, 
shocked, and directed the nation, have been made 
by Great Men too soon after a noble dinner, 
words winged by the Press without an accompany- 
ing and explanatory wine list. 

But the Nobodies are light-minded, casual, 
and good-hearted. Their great labour over, 
[107] 



Waiting for Daylight 

and their sacrifices buried, they have come out 
this day to celebrate the occasion with hilarious 
and ironic gaiety. They have won the Greatest 
of Wars, so they ride in motor-lorries and make 
delirious noises with comic instruments. Their 
heroic thoughts are blattering through penny 
trumpets. They have accomphshed what had 
been declared impossible, and now they rejoice 
with an inconsequential clatter on tea-trays and 
tin cans. 

Yet some of us who watched their behaviour 
saw the fantastic brightness in the streets on Ar- 
mistice Day only as a momentary veiling of the 
spectres of a shadow land which now will never 
pass. Who that heard "Tipperary" sung by 
careless men marching in France in a summer 
which seems a century gone will hear that foolish 
tune again without a sudden fear that he will 
be unable to control his emotion? And those 
Nobodies of Mons, the Marne, and the Aisne, 
what were they? The "hungry squad," the men 
shut outside the factory gates, the useless surplus 
of the labour market so necessary for a great 
nation's commercial prosperity. Their need kept 
the wages of their neighbours at an economic 
level. The men of Mons were of that other old 
[io8] 



The Nobodies 

rearguard, the hope of the captains of industry 
when there are revolts against the common lot 
of our industrial cities where the death-rates of 
young Nobodies, casualty lists of those who fall 
to keep us prosperous, are as ruinous as open 
war; a mutilation of life, a drainage of the 
nation's body that is easily borne by Christian 
folk who are moved to grief and action at the 
thought of Polynesians without Bibles. 

Yet the Nobodies stood to it at Mons. They 
bore us no resentment. We will say they fought 
for an England that is not us, an England that 
is nobler than common report and common 
speech. Think of the contempt and anger of the 
better end of London just before the War, when, 
at the other end, the people of Dockland re- 
volted and defied their masters! I knew one 
mother in that obscure host of ignorant humanity 
in revolt. Two of her infants were slowly fad- 
ing, and she herself was dying of starvation, yet 
she refused the entrance of charity at her door, 
and dared her man to surrender. He died later 
at Ypres. He died because of that very quality 
of his which moved his masters and superiors to 
anger; he refused at Ypres, as he did in Dockland, 
like those who were with him and were of his 
[109] 



Waiting for Daylight 

kind, to do more than mock defeat when it 
faced him. 

That figure of Nobody in sodden khaki, cum- 
bered with ugly gear, its precious rifle wrapped in 
rags, no brightness anywhere about it except the 
light of its eyes (did those eyes mock us, did they 
reproach us, when they looked into ours in Flan- 
ders?), its face seamed with lines which might 
have been dolorous, which might have been ironic, 
with the sweat running from under its steel 
casque, looms now in the memory, huge, statu- 
esque, silent but questioning, like an overshadow- 
ing challenge, like a gigantic legendary form 
charged with tragedy and drama ; and its eyes, 
seen in memory again, search us in privacy. Yet 
that figure was the "Cuthbert." It was derided 
by those onlookers who were not fit to kneel and 
touch its muddy boots. It broke the Hindenburg 
Line. Its body was thrown to fill the trenches it 
had won, and was the bridge across which our 
impatient guns drove in pursuit of the enemy. 

What is that figure now? An unspoken 
thought, which charges such names as Bullecourt, 
Cambrai, Bapaume, Croiselles, Hooge, and a 
hundred more, with the sound and premonition 
of a vision of midnight and all unutterable things. 
We sec it in a desolation of the mind, a shape 
[no] 



The Nobodies 

forlorn against the alien light of the setting of a 
day of dread, the ghost of what was fair, but was 
broken, and is lost. 



[Ill] 



XVII. Bookworms 

JANUARY i8, 1919. In Fleet Street yes- 
terday there was at lunch with us an Amer- 
ican Army officer who discoursed heartily 
about a certain literary public-house. He quoted 
a long passage from Dickens showing how some- 
body took various turnings near Fetter Lane, eas- 
ily to be recognized, till they arrived at this very 
tavern. Such enthusiasm is admirable, yet em- 
barrassing. In return, I inquired after several 
young American poets, whose work, seldom seen 
here, interests me, and I named their books. He 
had never heard of them. This enthusiast did 
not even appear to have the beginning of an idea 
that his was unforgivable ignorance seeing that he 
knew more than a native ought to know about 
some of our taverns. Had he been an English- 
man and a friend of mine I should have told him 
that I thought his love of letters was as spurious 
as the morality of the curate who speaks in a trem- 
bling baritone about changes in the divorce laws, 

[112] 



Bookworms 

but who accepts murder without altering the stat- 
utory smile of benediction. 

Literature would be lighter without that scroll 
work and top hamper. It has nothing to do with 
its life. It Is as helpful to us as wall-texts and 
those wonders we know as works of Pure 
Thought. Let us remember all the noble vol- 
umes of philosophy and metaphysics we ought to 
have read, to learn how wonderfully far our 
brains have taken us beyond the relic of Piltdown; 
and then recall what Ypres was like, and buy a 
teetotum instead. That much is saved. Now 
we need not read them. If we feel ourselves 
weakening towards such idleness, let us spin tops. 
If we had to choose between Garvice and say 
Hegel or Locke for a niche in the Temple of 
Letters, we should make an unintelligible blunder 
if we did not elect Mr. Garvice without discus- 
sion. He is human, he is ingenuous and funny, 
and the philosophers are only loosening with 
the insinuations of moth and rust. The philos- 
ophers are like the great statesmen and the great 
soldiers^ — we should be happier without them. If 
we are not happy and enjoying life, then we have 
missed the only reason for it. If books do not 
help us to this, if they even devise our thoughts 
Into knots and put straws In our hair, then they 

[113] 



Waiting for Daylight 

ought to be burned. It is true that some of us 
may get pleasure from searching novels for sole- 
cisms and collecting evidence by which shall be 
guessed the originals of the novelist's characters, 
just as others extract amusement from puzzle 
pictures. But book-worming has the same rela- 
tion to literature, even when it is done by a 
learned doctor in the Bodleian, as flies in a dairy 
with our milk supply. If most of the books in the 
British Museum were destroyed, we might still 
have a friend who would go with us to Amiens to 
get one more dinner in a well-remembered room, 
and drink to the shades; we might still, from the 
top of Lundy at dusk, watch the dim seas break 
into lilac around the Shutter Rock, while the un- 
seen kittiwakes were voices from the past; and we 
might still see Miss Muffet tiptoe on a June morn- 
ing to smell the first rose. That is what we look 
for in books, or something like it, and when it 
Is not there they are not books to us. 



[114] 



XVIII. Sailor Language 

FEBRUARY I, 1919. "What's in a 
word?" asks Admiral W. H. Smyth, with 
ironic intent, in his Sailors' fVord Book. 
There are people who are derided because they 
are inclined to hesitate over that unimportant 
doubt, selecting their words with a waste of time 
which is grievous, when the real value of the sov- 
ereign is but nine and ninepence, in an uneco- 
nomic desire to be as right as their knowledge will 
allow. There is something to be said for them. 
There is a case to be made for getting a task 
finished as well as one knows how, if interest in 
it was sufficient to prompt a beginning. A friend 
of mine, who could write a thousand interesting 
and popular words about an event, or even 
about nothing in particular, while I was still won- 
dering what I ought to do with it, once exclaimed 
In indignation and contempt when I put in a plea 
for Roget and his Thesaurus. He declared that 
a writer who used such a reference-book ought to 

[115] 



Waiting for Daylight 

be deprived of his paper and ink. He never used 
even a dictionary. His argument and the force 
of it humbled me, for I gathered that when he 
wrote he had but to put his hand in his pocket 
and pull out all the words he wanted by the fist- 
ful. I envy him. I wish I could do it, but there 
are times when every word I try seems opaque. 
It is useless to pretend that Roget is of material 
assistance then; for what remedy is there under 
heaven for the slow and heavy mind? But to 
me Roget is full of amusing suggestions, which 
would really have been very helpful to me had I 
wanted to use his words for any other purpose 
than the one in hand. It is true he rarely gives 
you the word you think you want, but not seldom 
in his assorted heaps of unused ornaments you 
are surprised by a glance of colour from an un- 
suspected facet of a common word. 

The Sailor^ s Word Book is no pamphlet; not 
in the least the kind of pocket book which once 
helped hurried British soldiers in a French shop 
to get fried eggs. It weighs, I should think, seven 
pounds, and it is packed with the vocabulary 
which has been built into the British ship during 
the thousand years and more of her growth. The 
origin of very many of the words retires, often 
beyond exact definition, into the cold mists of the 
[ii6] 



Sailor Language 

prehistoric Baltic, and to the Greek Islands, 
among the shadows of the men who first found 
the courage to lose sight of the hills. Commonly 
they are short words, smoothed by constant use 
till they might be imagined to be born of the cir- 
cumstances in which they are known, like the gulls 
and the foam of the wake. They carry like detona- 
tions in a gale. Yet quite often such words, 
when they are verbs, were once of the common 
stock of the language, as in the case of "belay," 
and it has happened that the sailor alone has been 
left to keep them alive. Dr. Johnson seems not 
to have known the meaning of the verb "to belay" 
among the other things he did not know but was 
very violent about. He thought it was a sea- 
phrase for splicing a rope, just as he supposed 
"main-sheet" was the largest sail of a ship. 

The Sailors' Word Book would be much more 
interesting than it is, though greatly heavier, if 
the derivation of the words were given, or even 
guessed at, a method which frequently makes the 
livelier story. We begin to understand what a 
long voyage our ship has come when we are told 
that "starboard" is steer-board, the side to which 
the steering-paddle was made fast before the mod- 
ern rudder was invented in the fourteenth century. 
Skcat informs us that both steor and bord are 

[117] 



Waiting for Daylight 

Anglo-Saxon; in fact, the latter word is the same 
in all the Celtic and Teutonic languages, so was 
used by those who first cut trees in Western 
Europe, and perhaps was here before they arrived 
to make our civilization what we know it. The 
opposite to starboard was larboard; but for good 
reason the Admiralty substituted port for lar- 
board in 1844. Why was the left side of a ship 
called the port side ? That term was in use before 
the Admiralty adopted it. It has been suggested 
that, as the steering-paddle was on the right side 
of a ship, it was good seamanship to have the har- 
bour or port on the left hand when piloting 
inwards. But it is doubtful if that reason was 
devised by a sailor. 

A few words in sea life — as fish, mere, and 
row — are said to be so old that the philologists 
refer them to the Aryans, or, as others might say, 
give them up as a bad job. These words appear 
to be common to all the sons of Adam who pre- 
ferred adventurous change to security in monot- 
ony, and so signed on as slaves to a galley. An- 
chor we imported from the Greeks — it is de- 
clared to be the oldest word from the Mediter- 
ranean in the language of our ships; admiral 
from the Arabs, and hammock and hurricane from 
the Caribs, through the Spaniards. But other 

[118] 



Sailor Language 

words of our seamen are as native to us as our 
grey weather, for we brought them with other 
habits overseas from the North — words like hail, 
storm, sea, ship, sail, strand, cliff, shower, mast, 
and flood. 

To examine words in this manner is simply to 
invite trouble, as did the man who assumed that 
"bending a sail" was done as one would bend a 
cane, not knowing that the sailor uses that word 
in the original sense of "fastening." Once, in 
my ignorance, I imagined "schooner" was of 
Dutch origin, but was careful to refer to the inval- 
uable Skeat. Only just in time, though. And 
he says that the word was born on the Clyde, 
grew up in New England, migrated to Holland, 
and then came back to us again. Once upon a 
time (17 13) at Gloucester, Massachusetts, a man 
was witnessing a new fore-and-aft rigged vessel 
glide away on a trial trip, and exclaimed "She 
scoons!" So all her kind were christened. Sci- 
ence of that kind is almost as good as romance. 



[119] 



XIX. Illusions 

FEBRUARY 15, 1919. Southwark Street 
is warehouses and railway bridges, and 
at its best is not beautiful; but when at 
night it Is 3. deep chasm through which whirl cata- 
racts of snow, and the paving is sludge, then, if 
you are at one end of it, the other end is as far 
away as joy. I was at one end of it, and at the 
other was my train, due to leave in ten minutes. 
Yet as there was a strike, there might be no train, 
and so I could not lose it; I had that consolation 
while judging that, with more than half a mile of 
snow and squall intervening from the north-east, I 
could not do the length of the street in ten min- 
utes. So I surrendered the train which might not 
run to whoever was able to catch it, and in that 
instant of renunciation the dark body of a motor 
lorry skidded to the kerb and stopped beside me. 
A voice that was as passionless as destiny told me 
to hop up, if I were going towards the station. 
The headlong lorry, the sombre masses of the 
[120] 



Illusions 

buildings which were now looming through the 
diminishing snow, and the winter's night, roused 
a vision of another place, much like it, or else the 
snow and the night made it seem like it, and so 
my uppermost thought became too personal, un- 
important, and curious for converse. All I said, 
as I took my place beside the steering wheel, was: 
"It's a wretched night," (But I might have 
been alone in the lorry. There was no immedi- 
ate answer.) I communed secretly with my 
memory. Then the voice returned out of the 
darkness. It startled me. "This corner," it re- 
marked, "always reminds me of a bit of Armen- 
tieres." The voice had answered my thought, 
and not my words. 

The lorry stopped and I got down. I never 
saw the driver. I do not know whose voice it 
was; if, indeed, there was with me in that lorry 
more than a shadow and an impersonal voice. 

Yet now the night could do its worst. I had 
the illusion that I had seen through it. Were 
these bleak and obdurate circumstances an im- 
posture? They appeared to have me imprisoned 
helplessly in time and snow; yet I had seen them 
shaken, and by a mere thought. Did their ap- 
pearance depend on the way we looked at them? 
Perhaps it was that. We are compelled by out- 
[121] 



Waiting for Daylight 

side things to their mould, and are mortified; 
but occasionally they fail to hide the joke. The 
laugh becomes ours, and circumstance must sub- 
mit to the way we see it. If Time playfully im- 
prisons us In a century we would rather have 
missed, where only the stars are left undisturbed 
to wink above the doings and noises of Bedlam, 
and where to miss the last train — supposing it 
runs at all — is the right end to a perfect day of 
blizzards and social squalls, what does it matter 
when we find that the whole of it is shaken by a 
single Idea? Might it not vanish altogether if 
enough of us could be found to laugh at it? This 
dream assisted me to some warmth of mind 
through the rest of the cold night till I arrived 
on the station platform, after the train had left. 

To help further in destroying my faith in the 
permanence of our affairs and institutions, it then 
appeared the platform was vacant because my 
train was not yet in. It was coming in at that 
moment — or so a porter told me. Our protean 
enemy took his most fearful form in the War 
when he became a Hidden Hand. Was this por- 
ter an agent of the gods for whose eternal leisure 
our daily confusion and bad temper make an 
amusing diversion? Was he one of the mali- 
cious familiars who are at work amongst us, 
[122] 



Illusions 

disguised, and who playfully set us by the ears 
with divine traps for boobies? This porter was 
grinning. He went away with his hand over his 
mouth, and at that moment a train stopped at 
the platform. The engine was at the wrong end 
of it. 

One official told me its proper locomotive 
was at East Grinstead, and that wc might not get 
it. Perhaps its home was there. And yet 
another official whose face was as mysterious as 
that of the station clock, which was wearing a 
paper mask, said that the engine of my train had, 
in fact, gone. It had gone to Brighton. He did 
not know why. It had gone alone. I turned 
vacantly from this bewilderment and saw a man 
with the sort of golden beard an immortal might 
have worn standing under a station lamp, and 
breaking now and then into peals of merriment, 
occasioned, it seemed to me, by what the first 
porter was telling him. Then both of them 
looked towards me, and stopped. If in one more 
gust of hearty laughter that hollow wilderness 
of a station had vanished, gloom and dreary 
echoes and frozen lights, and I had found my- 
self blinking in a surprising sunlight at that fel- 
low in the golden beard, while he continued to 
laugh at me in another world than this, where he 
[123] 



Waiting for Daylight 

was revealed for what he was, I was in the mind 
for placid acceptance. Well, the miraculous 
transformation was as likely as an engine for that 
train. 

The bearded one approached me. I did not 
run away. I waited for the next thing. He had 
a book under his arm, and it is likely that the 
gods, who have no need to learn the truth, never 
read books. "If," he told me, "you want to get 
to Sheepwash, you had better take this other 
train. It is going half the way. The engine for 
the train for Sheepwash can't be found." 

We both boarded the train for half the journey, 
and it did not appear to have any other passen- 
gers. Yet, reckless of the risks I was taking in 
travelling alone with a suspected being at such a 
time — for where might not he and the train go? 
— I accepted the chance; and as I took my seat 
and regarded that bright beard, the shadow of 
my awful doubt became really serious, for it was 
only this week that I have been reading The 
TzviUght of the Gods. There was the disin- 
tegrating recollection of that book, with its stories 
of homeless immortals in search of new and more 
profitable employ; and there had been a bodiless 
voice in a motor lorry which ignored what I said 
but spoke instead to an inconsequential memory 

[124] 



Illusions 

of mine that was strictly private; and there was 
the levity with which uniformed officials treated 
the essential institutions of civilization. All this 
gave me the sensation that even the fixed policy 
of our strong government might, at any moment 
now, roll up as a scroll. 

Off we went. My fellow-traveller was silent, 
though he was smiling at something which was 
not in the carriage, to my knowledge. When he 
spoke, his eyes were not fixed on me. He looked 
into the air, and talked to whatever it was he saw. 
He pointed a finger at the light of the city lying 
beyond and below our carriage window. "All 
they've built," he said, "stands only on a few 
odd notions. Now they're changing their no- 
tions, so down comes everything with a run. And 
don't they look surprised and pained!" (I felt 
like an eavesdropper, and thought I'd better show 
him I was present.) I apologized for overhear- 
ing him. He nodded shortly, a little condescend- 
ingly. "We've accepted that" — he poked his stick 
towards where stood our Imperial city in the 
night — "as if it came by itself. We never knew 
our city was like that just because we never 
saw it in any other light. Now we're upset to 
find the magic-lantern picture is fading. Got to 
put up with it, though." His book had been on 



Waiting for Daylight 

the seat. It fell to the floor, and I picked it up 
and handed it to him. It was The Twilight of 
the Gods. 

If I could hav^e remembered at that moment 
one of the simple dodges for avertmg the evil 
eye I should have used it. The laughing malice 
of that book had so confused me for some days 
that I had begun to feel that even St. Paul's, a 
blue bubble floating over London on the stream 
of Time, might v'anish, as bubbles will. The 
Hidden Hand, I began to believe, had something 
in it. 

I intrigued a serious interview with my fellow- 
passenger, hoping to find evidence; and then the 
train stopped finally, six miles from home. At 
that very instant of time the train which we had 
previously rejected because it had no engine chose 
to run express through the station where we stood. 



[126] 



XX. Figure-Heads 

MARCH I, 19 19. When the car got to 
the Board of Trade Office, which is 
opposite the old chapel of ease where 
the crews of John Company's ships "used to wor- 
ship," as a local history tells us, I saw Uncle 
Dave by the kerb, with time apparently on his 
hands. I got down. 

He told me old Jackson is dead. Jackson 
was a mast and block maker, but his fame was the 
excellence of his figure-heads. It is many years 
since old Jackson made one, but If It is doubted 
that he was an artist, there is a shop near 
where he once lived which still displays three of 
his images, the size of life, reputed to have been 
conjured from baulks of timber with an ax. I 
remember Jackson. He rarely answered you 
when you questioned him about those ships to 
which he had given personality and eyes that 
looked sleeplessly overseas from their prows. 
He regarded you, and only his whiskers moved in 
[127] 



Waiting for Daylight 

silent indifference (he chewed), as though you 
were wasting the time of a man and an artist. 
Those images of his were all of women. He 
would make no figure-head for a ship bearing the 
name of a man, though it were that of a Greek 
hero. And, of course, you dare not even think of 
the trousered legs of a modern man stuck each 
side of a ship's prow, boots and all; but the dra- 
pery of a woman flows with grace there. She 
would look indeed its vigilant guardian spirit. It 
would be pleasing to write of some of the more 
famous of those idols, as I remember them in re- 
pose, above the quays of the docks. 

Here we were joined by some young men who 
knew Uncle Dave. They were looking for a ship. 
But Uncle continued to tell me of the merits 
of his friend the maker of figure-heads. A stoker 
became a trifle irritated. "Well, what's the good 
of 'em, anyway?" he interjected. "Lumber, I 
call 'em. They can't be carried on straight 
stems, and clipper-bows aren't wanted these days, 
wasting good metal. Why, even Thompson's 
White Star liners have chucked that sort of truck. 
They're not built like it now. What's the good 
of figger-'eds?" 

This youth's casual blasphemy in the presence 

[128] 



Figu re-Heads 

of Uncle Dave (who once was bo'sun of a China 
clipper), extolling as he did his age of mere ma- 
chines against the virtues of an age when ships 
were expected to look good as well as do good 
things, made us shrink in anticipation of the 
storm. For Uncle Dave has a habit of listening 
to a talk about ships in a deliberate and contemp- 
tuous silence, with nothing to show of his inward 
heat but a baleful light in the eye. He does not 
like steamers. He does not think steamer-men 
are seamen. He declares they can never be 
seamen. And now we waited, dreading that his 
anger, when it burst, would be quite incoherent 
with force. There was really something of 
hatred in his look as he gazed at the youngster, 
his mouth a little open, his hand holding his 
trembling pipe just away from his mouth, which 
had forgotten it. The old sailor bent forward, 
screwing his eyes at this young man as though 
trying to believe it was real. 

An older hand interposed. "Ah, come away 
now! I've heard chaps make game of figger- 
'eds, an' call 'em superstition. But I say let such 
things alone. I know things that's happened to 
funny fellows through making game of figger-'eds. 
There was the Barbadian Lass. She was a brig- 
[129] 



Waiting for Daylight 

antine. She used to run to Trinidad. There 
was something queer about her figger-'ed. It was 
a half-breed woman. She was smiling. She had 
bare breasts, and she used to wear earrings. 
Her chaps used to keep a spare pair for her in a 
box. She was always fresh and bright, but 
I've heard say she was never painted — no, not 
since the day the ship was launched. She kept 
like that. And one day young Belfast MacCor- 
mick slipped a tar-brush over her dial. Said it 
was idolatry. And what happened to him? 
You answer me that!" 

"Yes, I know," broke in one of us. "But 
you can't say it was along of that tar-brush . . ." 

"You young chaps ain't got no sense," here 
interrupted Uncle, his voice evidently under con- 
trol, but shaky. "I'd like to know where you 
were brought up. You learn it all wrong at them 
schools of yours, and you never get it right after- 
wards. You learn about the guts of engines and 
'lectricity, and you mix it up with the tales 
your grandmothers told you, and you get nothing 
straight. What you've got is all science and 
superstition. And then you wonder why you 
make a mess of it. Listen 1 It don't matter 
what you do to a figger-'ed, if you're fool enough 

[130] 



Figu re-Heads 

to spoil it. It's having it that matters. It's 
something to go by, and a ship you're glad to 
work in." 

He turned on the stoker. There was astonish- 
ment and pity in his glance. "Look at you. In 
and out of a ship, and you forget her name when 
you've signed off. You don't care the leavings 
in a Dago's mess-kit for any ship you work in, if 
you can get a bit out of her and skip early." 

"That's me, Uncle," muttered the stoker. 

"Can you remember names, like some of us re- 
member the Mermus, the Blackadder, and the 
Titania? Not you. Your ships haven't got 
names, properly speaking. They're just a run 
out and home again for you, and a row about the 
money and the grub." 

"Sure to be a row about the grub," murmured 
the stoker. 

"What are ships nowadays?" he went on, 
raising a shaking index finger. "Are they ships 
at all? They're run by companies on the make, 
and worked by factory hands who curse their 
own house-flags. It's a dirty game, I call it. 
Things are all wrong. I can't make them out. 
You fellers take no pride in your work, and you've 
got no work to take pride in. You don't know 

[131] 



Waiting for Daylight 

who you work for or what, and your ships got no 
names. They might be damned goods vans. 
No good in a figger-'ed! Then I'll tell you this. 
Then rU tell you this. You'll get no good till 
you learn better, my lad.'' 



[132] 



XXI. Economics 

MARCH 22, 1919. There is an aston- 
ishing number of books on what is 
called Reconstruction in the new publi- 
cations of this spring. Reconstruction seems to 
be as easy as conscription or destruction. We 
have only to change our mind, and there we are, 
as though nothing had happened. It is the 
greatest wonder of the human brain that its 
own accommodating ratiocination never affords 
it any amusement. We use reason only to 
make convincing disguises for our desires and 
appetites. Perhaps it is fear of the wrath 
to come that is partly responsible for the clam- 
our of the economists and sociologists in the 
publishers' announcements, almost drowning 
there the drone of the cataract of new novels. 
But it is too late now. The wrath will come. 
After mischievously bungling with the magic 
which imprisoned the Djinn, we may wish we had 
not done it; but once he is out there is 

[133] 



Waiting for Daylight 

nothing for it but to be surprised and sorry. 
The lid is off; and it is useless for the clever re- 
constructionists to press in upon us with their 
little screw-drivers, chattering eagerly about locks 
and hinges. When the crafty but ignorant Rus- 
sian generals and courtiers got from the Czar the 
order for mobilizing the armies, and issued it, 
they did not know it, but that was when they re- 
leased Lenin. And who on earth can now inveigle 
that terrific portent safely under lid and lock 
again? 



[134] 



XXII. Old Sunlight 

APRIL 5, 19 19. I find the first signs of 
this spring, now the War is over, al- 
most unbelievable. I have watched 
this advent with astonishment, as though it were 
a phantom. The feeling is the same as when 
waking from an ugly dream, and seeing in doubt 
the familiar objects in a morning light. They 
seem steadfast. Are they real, or is the dream? 
The morning works slowly through the mind to 
take the place of the night. Its brightness and 
tranquillity do not seem right. And is it not 
surprising to find the spring has come again to 
this world? The almond tree might be an un- 
timely, thoughtless, and happy stranger. What 
does it want with us? That spiritual and tinted 
fire with which its life burns touches and kindles 
no responsive and volatile essence in us. I passed 
a hedge-bank which looked south and was reviv- 
ing. There were crumbs and nuggets of chalk in 
it, and they were as remarkable to me this year 

[13s] 



Waiting for Daylight 

as though I had once seen those flecks of white 
showing through the herbage of another planet. 
That crumbling earth with the grey matting 
of old grass was as warm to the touch as 
though some inner virtue had grown, all un- 
suspected by us, in the heart of this glacial ball. 
I picked up a lump of chalk with its cold greenish 
shadows, and powdered it in my fingers, wonder- 
ing why it looked so suddenly bright. Tt con- 
firmed my existence. Its smell was better than 
any news 1 have heard of late. 

I saw suddenly the gleaming coast of a conti- 
nent of dark cloud, and the blue ocean into which 
it jutted its headlands; memory had suddenly re- 
turned. At that moment the sun touched my 
hand. All this was what we used to know in a 
previous life. When I got home I took down 
Sclbonic. Two photographs fell out of it, and 
when I picked them up — they were those of a 
young amateur and were yellow with age — 
spring really began to penetrate the bark. But it 
was not the spring of this year. 

How often, like another tortoise, has the mind 
come out of its winter to sun itself in the new 
warmth of a long-gone Selborne April? Did 
Gilbert White imagine he was bequeathing light 
to us? Of course not. He lived quietly in the 

[136] 



Old Sunlight 

obscure place where he was born, and did not 
try to improve or influence anybody. It seems 
he had no wish to be a great leader, or a great 
thinker, or a great orator. The example of 
Chatham did not fire him. He was friendly 
with his neighbours, but went about his business. 
When he died there did not appear to be any 
reason whatever to keep him in memory. He 
had harmed no man. He left us without having 
improved gunpowder. Could a man have done 
less? 

Think of the events which were stirring men 
while he was noting the coming and going of 
swallows. While he lived, Clive began the con- 
quest of India, and Canada was taken from the 
French. White heard the news that our Ameri- 
can colonists had turned Bolshevik because of the 
traditional skill of the administrators of other 
people's affairs at Whitehall. The world appears 
to have been as full then of important uproar as 
it is to-day. I suppose the younger Pitt, "the 
youngest man ever appointed Prime Minister," 
had never heard of White. But Gilbert does not 
seem to have heard of him; nor of Hargreaves' 
spinning jenny, nor of the inventor of the steam 
engine. "But I can show you some specimens 
of my new mice," he remarks on March 30, 1768. 

[137] 



Waiting for Daylight 

That was the year in which the great Pitt re- 
signed. His new mice ! 

Yet for all the stirring affairs and inventions 
of his exciting time, with war making and break- 
ing empires, and the foundations of this country's 
wealth and power being nobly laid, it would not 
be easy to show that we to-day are any the hap- 
pier. Our own War was inherent in the inven- 
tions of mechanical cotton-spinning and the steam- 
engine — the need to compel foreign markets to 
buy the goods we made beyond our own needs. 
We know now what were the seeds the active and 
clever fellows of Gilbert's day were sowing for 
us. We were present at the harvesting. Why 
did not those august people, absorbed in the mo- 
mentous deeds which have made history so 
sonorous, the powder shaking out of their wigs 
with the awful gravity of their labours (while all 
the world wondered), just stop doing such con- 
sequential things, and accept Gilbert's invitation 
to go and listen to him about those new mice? 
The mice might have saved us, and the oppor- 
tunity was lost. 

Looking back at those times, of all the thun- 
derous events which then loosened excited tongues, 
caused by high-minded men of action expertly con- 
juring crisis after crisis while their docile fol- 

[138] 



Old Sunlight 

lowers scrambled out of one sublime trouble into 
another, heated and exhausted, but still gaping 
with obedience and respect, we can see that 
nothing remains but the burial parties, whose 
work is yet uncompleted in France. What good 
does persist out of those days is the light in which 
Gilbert's tortoise sunned itself. It is a light 
which has not gone out. And it makes us wonder, 
not how much of our work in these years will 
survive to win the gratitude of those who will 
follow us, but just what it is they will be grateful 
for. Where is it, and what happy man is doing 
it? And what are we thinking of him? Do we 
even know his name? 



[139] 



XXIII. Ruskin 

APRIL 19, 1 9 19. Some good people 
have been celebrating Ruskin, whose 
centenary it is. And to-day a little 
friend of mine left her school books so that I 
might wonder what they were when I saw them 
on my table. One of them was The Crown of 
Wild Olive. It put me in a reminiscent mood. 
I looked at Ruskin's works on my shelves, and 
tried to recall how long it was since they inter- 
ested me. Nevertheless, I would not part with 
them. In my youth Ruskin's works were only for 
the wealthy, and I remember that my purchase of 
those volumes was an act of temerity, and even 
of sacrifice. And who but an ingrate would find 
fault with Ruskin, or would treat him lightly? 
With courage and eloquence he denounced dis- 
honesty in the days when it was not supposed that 
cheating could be wrong if it were successful. 
He did that when minds were so dark that people 
blinked with surprise at a light which showed as 
[140] 



Ruskin 

a social iniquity naked children crawling with 
chains about them in the galleries of coal-mines. 
Was it really wrong to make children do that? 
Or was Ruskin only an impossible idealist? They 
were the happy years, radiant with the certain 
knowledge of the British that the Holy Grail 
would be recognized immediately It was seen, 
for over It would be proudly floating the con- 
firmatory Union Jack. We had not even begun 
to suspect that our morals, manners, and laws 
were fairly poor compared with the standards 
of the Mohawks and Mohicans whom our set- 
tlers had displaced in America a century before. 
And Ruskin told that Victorian society it had an 
ugly mind, and did ugly things. When Ruskin 
said so, with considerable emotion, Thackeray 
was so hurt that he answered as would any clever 
editor to-day about a contribution which convinced 
him that It would make readers angry; he told 
Ruskin it would never do. Thackeray's readers, 
of course, were assured they were the best people, 
and that worldly cynic did well to reject Ruskin, 
and preserve the Cornhill Magazine. 

"Ruskin," It says In the introduction to The 
Crown of IVild Olive which my little friend reads 
at school, "is certainly one of the greatest masters 
of English prose." That has often been declared. 

[141] 



Waiting for Daylight 

But is he? Or is our tribute to Ruskin only a 
show of gratitude to one who revealed to us the 
unpleasant character of our national habits 
when contrasted with a standard for gentlemen? 
It ought not to have required much eloquence to 
convince us that Widnes is unlovely; the smell of 
It should have been enough. It is curious that 
we needed festoons of chromatic sentences to 
warn us that cruelty to children, even when profit 
can be made of it, is not right. But I fear some 
people really enjoy remorseful sobbing. It is half 
the fun of doing wrong. Yet I would ask in hu- 
mility — for it is a fearful thing to doubt Ruskin, 
the literary divinity of so many right-thinking 
people — whether English children who are learn- 
ing the right way to use their language, and the 
noblest ideas to express, should run the risk of 
having Ruskin's example set before them by soft- 
hearted teachers? I think that a parent who 
knew a child of his, on a certain day, was to take 
the example of Ruskin as a prose stylist on the 
subject of war, would do well, on moral and aes- 
thetic grounds, to keep his child away from school 
on that day to practise a little roller-skating. For 
humility and gratitude should not blind us to the 
fact that few writers in English of Ruskin's rep- 
utation have ever considered such a rosy cloud of 
[142] 



Ruskin 

rhetoric as is his lecture on war, in which a 
reasonable shape no sooner looms than it is lost 
again, to be worth preserving. The subject of 
war is of importance, inflammable humanity be- 
ing what it is, and the results of war being what 
we know; and the quality of the critical attention 
we give to so great a matter is unfortunately 
clear when we regard the list of distinguished 
critics of letters who have accepted, apparently 
without difBculty, as great prose, Ruskin's heed- 
less rush of words upon it. Perhaps his lan- 
guage appears noble because the rhythmic pour of 
its sentences lulls reason into a comfortable and 
benignant sleepiness. 

I remember the solemn voice of a lecturer on 
English literature, years ago, moving me to buy 
The Crown of Wild Olive. Such obvious ignor- 
ance as I knew mine to be could not be tolerated. 
Whatever I went without, it could not be that 
book. I put it in my hold-all when, as was my 
duty, I went for my training with the artillery 
volunteers. I read in camp the essay on war, 
when bombardiers no longer claimed my atten- 
tion, and the knightly words of sergeant instruct- 
ors were taking a needed rest. I pondered 
over that essay, and concluded that though plainly 
I was very young and very wrong to feel puzzled 

[143] 



Waiting for Daylight 

and even derisive over English prose which fasci- 
nated a learned lecturer into solemnity, yet I 
would sooner learn to make imitation flowers of 
wool than read that essay to a critical audience, 
especially if I had written it myself. 

Ruskin, in fact, with no more experience of 
war than a bishop's wife, did not know what he 
was talking about. Throughout the essay, too, 
he is in two minds. One is that of a gentleman 
who knows that war is the same phenomenon, ar- 
tistically, ethically, and socially, as a public-house 
riot with broken bottles caused by a dispute over 
one of those fundamental principles which are 
often challenged in such a place. Those riots are 
natural enough. They are caused by the nature of 
man. They continue to happen, for it has taken 
the Church longer to improve our manners than 
it has taken stock-raisers to improve the milking 
qualities of kine. And Ruskin's other mind is 
still in the comical Tennysonian stage about war, 
dwelling with awe on swords and shields, glory, 
honour, patriotism, courage, spurs, pennants, and 
tearful but resolute ladies who wave their hand- 
kerchiefs in the intervals of sobbing over their 
"loved ones." 

He calls war "noble play." He scorns cricket. 
As for his "style" and his "thought": "I use," 

[144] 



Ruskin 

says Ruskin, "in such a question, the test which I 
have adopted, of the connexion of war with other 
arts, and I reflect how, as a sculptor, I should feel 
if I were asked to design a monument for West- 
minster Abbey, with a carving of a bat at one end 
and a ball at the other. It may be there remains 
in me only a savage Gothic prejudice; but I had 
rather carve it with a shield at one end and a 
sword at the other." 

I cannot tell whether Ruskin reflected so be- 
cause of a savage Gothic prejudice, but I am cer- 
tain he wrote like that moved by what we feel — 
the feeling goes deeper into time even than the 
Goths — about the victim for sacrifice. We must 
justify that sacrifice, and so we give It a ceremo- 
nial ritual and dignity. Otherwise, I think, Rus- 
kin would not have suggested the shield and 
sword as the symbolic decorations. He felt in- 
stinctively and because of a long-accepted tradi- 
tion that those antique symbols were the only way 
to hide the ugly look of the truth. For certainly 
he could have used a ball at one end — a cannon- 
ball — and a mortar at the other. Just as we 
might use an aerial torpedo at one end, and the 
image of a mutilated child at the other; or a gas 
cylinder at one end, and a gas-mask at the other. 
But the artist is not going to be deprived of his 

[145] 



Waiting for Daylight 

romance through a touch of the actual, any more 
than the lady with the handkerchief can be ex- 
pected to forego her anguished sob over her hero 
as he goes forth to battle. 

We saw that in our Great War. The ancient 
appeal of the patriots rushed us away from reason 
with *'last stands," and the shot-riddled banners 
wavering in the engulfing waves of barbarians, 
till an irresistable cavalry charge scattered the 
hordes. All this replaced the plumes, the shin- 
ing armour, and the chivalrous knights. Ruskin, 
however, was a subtle improvement even on the 
last stand with the shot-riddled banner. He an- 
ticipated those who have been most popular be- 
cause they made our War entrancing and endur- 
able. He went to the heart of the matter. He 
knew that the audience which would the more 
readily agree with him when he made an emo- 
tional case for the ennobling nature of war would 
be mainly of reclused women. He addressed 
them. So did, of late, some of our most suc- 
cessful writers on war. They, like Ruskin, made 
their appeal to that type of mind which obtains a 
real satisfaction, a sensuous pleasure, from con- 
templating the unseen sufferings of the young and 
vicarious victim sobbing, and feeling noble and 
enduring. 

[.46] 



XXIV.The Reward of Virtue 



MAY 9, 19 19. The Treaty of Peace is 
published. Compared with what the 
innocent in 19 15 called the "objects of 
the War," this treaty is as the aims of Captain 
Morgan's ruffians to those of the Twelve Apos- 
tles. The truth is, some time ago the Versailles 
drama fell to the level of an overworked news- 
paper story which shrewd editors saw was past 
its day. Those headlines. Humiliate the Hun, 
Hang the Kaiser, and Make Germany Pay, had 
become no more interesting than a copy of last 
week's Morning Mischief in a horse-pond. The 
subject was old and wet. Because five months 
ago we thoughtfully elected men of the counting- 
house to the work of governing the State, of late 
we have been too indignant over the cost and dif- 
ficulty of living to spare a thought for the beauty 
of Peace; that is why we are now examining the 
clauses of the famous Treaty with about as much 
care for what they may mean to us a,s if they con- 

[147] 



Waiting for Daylight 

cerned the movements of the Asteroids. A year 
ago the German attacks seemed near to making 
guns the deciding voice in the affairs of unhappy 
humanity. On the chill and overcast spring 
morning when the Treaty was published, it was 
significant that those very few men to whom we 
could go for courage a year ago were the only 
people dismayed by the terms of the Peace 
Treaty. And the timid, who once went to those 
stout hearts for assurance — to have, as the sol- 
diers used to say, their cold feet massaged — were 
the bright and cheerful souls. It was ominous. 
Yet those careless and happy hearts are not so 
trying to me as the amiable but otherwise sensible 
men who were sure our statesmen would not be- 
tray the dead, and who are incredulous over the 
Treaty now they see what it clearly intends to 
convey. They cannot believe that the War, 
which they thought began as a war of liberation, 
a struggle of Europe to free itself from the intol- 
erable bonds of its past, continues In the Peace 
Treaty as a force malignantly deflected to the 
support of the very evils out of which August, 
19 14, arose. Then did they imagine the well- 
meaning leopard would oblige by changing his 
spots if spoken to kindly while he was eating the 
baby? 

[148] 



XXV. Great Statesmen 

MAY,3i,i9i9. What Is wrong with our 
statesmen? I think the answer is 
simple. Success in a political career 
can be understood by all of us. It attracts the 
attention which applauds the owner of a Derby 
winner, or the Bishop who began as a poor, indus- 
trious, but tactful child. John the Baptist failed 
to attract the publicity he desired; and Christ 
drew it as a criminal, for the religious and politi- 
cal leaders of his day recognized what his teach- 
ing would lead to as easily as would any magis- 
trate to-day who had before him a carpenter ac- 
cused of persuading soldiers that killing Is mur- 
der. Politicians move on the level of the com- 
mon intelligence, and compete there with each 
other in charging the ignorance of the common- 
alty with emotion. A politician need be no more 
than something between a curate and a card- 
sharper. If he knows anything of the arts, of 
history, of economics, or of science, he had better 

[149] 



Waiting for Daylight 

forget it, or else use it as a forestallcr would a 
knowledge of the time when prices should be 
raised. A confident man with a blood-shot voice 
and a gift for repartee is sure to make a success of 
politics, especially if he is not too particular. 
This did not matter once, perhaps, when politics 
merely afforded excitement for taverns and a ca- 
reer for the avid and meddlesome. The 
country was prosperous, and so it was difficult to 
do it serious harm. 

But to-day, just when we must have the leading 
of moral, judicious, and well-informed minds, or 
perish, we have only our statesmen. It never 
occurs to the crowd that its business would be 
more successfully transacted by a chance group, 
say of headmasters of elementary schools, than 
by the statesmen who, at Versailles recently, 
dared not face the shocking realities because 
these could not be squared with a Treaty which 
had to frame the figments of the hustings. The 
trouble with our statesmen is that they have been 
concerned hitherto merely to attend to the ma- 
chinery, running freely and with little friction, of 
industrial society. They did not create that ma- 
chinery. They but took it over. They knew 
nothing of the principles which motived it. Our 
statesmen were only practical politicians and 

[150] 



Great Statesmen 

business men. They held in contempt the fine 
abstract theories of physics, mechanics, and dy- 
namics. It was safe for them to do so. The ma- 
chinery went on running, apparently of its own 
volition. All went well until the War. Now 
the propeller-shaft of industrial society is frac- 
tured, our ship is wallowing in the trough of the 
seas, and the men who should put things right for 
us do not even know that it is the main shaft on 
which they should concentrate. They are irritat- 
ing the passengers by changing the cabins, confis- 
cating luggage, insisting on higher fares, cutting 
down the rations, and instructing the sailors in 
the goose-step; but the ship has no way on her, 
and the sound of breakers grows louder from a 
sombre, precipitous, and unknown coast. 



[151] 



XXVI. Joy 



JULY 19, 19 19. It has come. This is the 
great day of the English. Many have 
doubted whether we should ever have it, 
for faith had been weak and the mind weary 
while the enemy was still fixed in his fanatic reso- 
lution. But here it is, half my window-blind 
already bright with its first light. To-day we 
celebrate our return to peace, to an earth made 
the fairer for children, fit for the habitation of 
free men, safe for quiet folk . . . the day that 
once had seemed as remote as truth, as in- 
accessible as good fortune; a day, so we used to 
think in France, more distant even than those in- 
credible years of the past that were undervalued 
by us, when we were happy in our ignorance of 
the glory men could distil from misery and filth; 
when we had not guessed what wealth could be 
got from the needs of a public anxious for its 
life; nor that sleeping children could be bombed 
in a noble cause. Yes, it had seemed to us even 

[152] 



Joy 

farther off than our memories of the happy past. 
Yet here it Is, Its coffee-cups tinkling below, and I 
welcome Its early shafts of gold like the fortune 
they are. The fortune seems innocent and una- 
ware of its nature. It does not know what it 
means to us. I had often been with soldier 
friends across the water when with mock rapture 
they had planned an itinerary for this day. 
They spoke of it where their surroundings made 
the thought of secure leisure or unremarkable 
toil only a painful reminder of what was beatific, 
but might never be. This day had not come to 
them. But it had come to me. 

I was luckier than they. Yet when luck comes 
to us, does it ever look quite as we had Imagined 
it when it was not ours? I lift the curtain on this 
luck, and look out. From an upper window of 
the house opposite the national emblem of the 
American Republic Is hanging like an apron. 
Next door to It a man is decorating his window- 
sills with fairy lamps, and from his demeanour he 
might be devising a taboo against evil. I see no 
other sign that the new and better place of our 
planet was bding acknowledged. The street Is as 
the milkman and the postman have always known 
it on a quiet morning. 

A cock crowed. It was then I knew that, 

[IS3] 



Waiting for Daylight 

though the morning was like all good sunrises, 
which are the same for the unjust and the right- 
eous, I, somehow, was different. Chanticleer 
was quite near, but his confident and defiant voice, 
I recognized with a start, was a call from some 
other morning. It was the remembered voice of 
life at sunrise, as old as the jungle, alert, glad, 
and brave. Then why did it not sound as if it 
were meant for me? Why did it not accord, as 
once it did, with the coming of a new day, when 
the renewed and waiting earth was veritably 
waiting for us? Yet the morning seemed the 
same, its sounds the familiar confidences, its light 
the virgin innocence of a right beginning. Was 
this new light ours? While looking at it I 
thought that perhaps there is another light, an 
aura of something early and rare, which, once it 
is doused, cannot be re-kindled, even by the sun 
which rises to shine on a great victory. 

I began to feel that this early confusion of 
thought, over even so plain a cause for joy as 
morning, might be a private hint that it would be 
as hard to tell the truth about peace as it used to 
be about battle. And how diflicult it is to 
tell the truth about war, and even how improper, 
some of us know. For what a base traitor even 
truth may be> to good patriots, when she insists 

[154] 



Joy 

that her mirror cannot help reflecting what is 
there! Why should the best instincts of loyal 
folk be thus embarrassed? If they do not wish 
to know what is there, when that is what it is like, 
is it right, lis it gentlemanly, to show them? 

How easy it would be to write of peace in the 
Capital, where the old highways have been dec- 
orated for many kings, marshals, and admirals, 
and the flags have been hung for victories since 
England first bore arms. So why should one be 
dubious of a few unimportant suburban byways, 
where the truth is plain, and is not charged with 
many emotions through the presence of an em- 
peror and his statesmen and soldiers, all of them 
great, all of them ready for our superlatives to 
add to their splendour? 

But perhaps the more you know of a place, the 
greater is your perplexity. That old vicarage 
wall, lower down my street, is merely attractive 
in the sun of Peace Day. A stranger, if he 
noticed it, might at the most admire its warm 
tones, and the tufts of hawkweed and snapdragon 
which arc scattered on its ledges. But from this 
same window, on a winter morning, when affairs 
were urgent in France, I have seen youth assem- 
bled by that wall. Youth was silent. There 
was only a sergeant's voice in all the street. I 



Waiting for Daylight 

think I hear now the diminishing trampling of 
quick feet marching away; and see a boy's face 
as he turned near the top of the rise to wave his 
hand. But look now, and say where are the 
shades on a bright morning! 

I went out, a dutiful citizen, to celebrate. No 
joy can be truthfully reported till just this side of 
the High Street, where there were three girls with 
linked arms dancing In lax and cheerful oblivion, 
one of them quite drunk. Near them stood a 
cart with a man, a woman, and a monkey in It. 
The superior animals were clothed in red, white, 
and blue, and the monkey was wearing a Union 
Jack for a ruff. The ape was humping himself 
on the tail-board, and from his expression he 
might have been wondering how long all this 
would last. His gay companions were rosily 
chanting that if they caught some one bending It 
would be of no advantage to him. The main 
thoroughfare was sanded, and was waiting for 
the official procession. Quiet citizens were stroll- 
ing about with their children, and what they were 
thinking is as great a mystery as what the popu- 
lace at Memphis thought when the completion of 
the Great Pyramid was celebrated by the order of 
Cheops. In a room of an upper storey near the 
town hall a choir was singing the Hallelujah 
[iS6] 



Joy 

Chorus, and below, on the pavement, a hospital 
nurse, In a red wig, stood gravely listening, sway- 
ing to and fro, holding her skirts high, so that we 
saw beneath the broad slacks of an able seaman. 

The chorus ceased, and In gratitude for the 
music the nurse embraced a Highland soldier, 
who was standing near and who was secretly 
amused, I believe, by the nurse's trousers. Then 
we heard the bands of the military procession in 
the distance, and It was In that moment I saw a 
young officer I knew, who was out as early as 
Neuve Chapelle, gazing, like everybody else. In 
the direction of the martial sounds. Before I 
could reach him through the press he had turned, 
and was walking hurriedly down a side street, as 
though In flight. I could not follow him. I 
wanted to see the soldiers. My reason was no 
better than some sentimental emotion; for I saw 
the original Contemptibles march off for Mons; 
and was with a battalion of the 9th Division, the 
first of Kitchener's men to go Into the line; and 
saw the Derby men come out and begin; and at 
the last discovered that the conscripts were as 
good as the rest. Some of the survivors were 
marching towards me. 

But I did not recognize them. Many were 
elderly men who were displaying proud tunics of 

[157] 



Waiting for Daylight 

volunteer regiments as old as Hyde Park Parades 
by Queen Victoria. One looked then for the 
sections from the local lodges of the Druids, 
Oddfellows, Buffaloes, and the He-Goats. 
There was the band of the local cadets, sponta- 
neous In its enthusiasm, its zest for martial music 
no different, of course. Just behind these lads a 
strange figure walked in the procession, a bent 
and misshapen old man, whose face had no ex- 
pression but a fixed and hypnotic stare. He was 
keeping time to the measure of the boys' music 
by snapping the spring of a mouse-trap which he 
held aloft. I could not find him in the program. 
Was he also drunk? Or was he a terrible jest? 
Most of our triumphant display followed this 
figure. If our illusions go, what is left to us? 
Ah, our memories of the Somme ! That young 
oflSccr who turned away when he saw Triumph 
approaching acted on a right instinct. 

There Is a hilltop near us. It looks to other 
hills over a great space of southern England, and 
at night on the far promontories of the Downs 
bonfires were to be lighted. I have no doubt 
signals flared from them when the Romans were 
baffled. Again to-night they would signal that 
the latest enemy had been vanquished. 

It was raining gently, and from our own crest 

[■58] 



Joy 

the lower and outer night was void. ~K touch of 
distant phosphorescence that waned, and inten- 
sified again to a strong white glow, presently gave 
the void one far and lonely hilltop. A cloud else- 
where appeared out of nothing, and persisted, a 
lenticular spectre of dull fire. These aerial 
spectres became a host; some were so far away 
that they were faint smears of orange, and others 
so near and great that they pulsed and revealed 
the shapes of the clouds. It was all impersonal, 
it was England itself that was reflected, the hills 
that had awakened. It was the emanation of a 
worthy tradition, older than ourselves, that was 
re-kindled and was glowing, and that would be 
here when we are not. It was so receptive, it 
was so spacious, that our gravest memories could 
abide there, as if night were kind to the secrets 
we dare not voice, and understood folly and re- 
morse, and could protect our better visions, and 
had sanctuary and consolation for that grief 
which looks to what might have been, but now 
can never be. 

A spark glittered near, a spark that towered 
and hovered overhead, and burst into coiling vol- 
umes of lurid smoke with a moving heart of flame. 
Light broke on a neighbouring hill that had been 
unseen and forgotten; the hill was crowned with 

[159] 



Waiting for Daylight 

fantastic trees that danced, and a wavering tower. 
From our own valley below there came a vicious 
tearing that gave me a momentary chill (so 
sounds a stream of machine-gun lead, going 
over), and a group of coloured stars expanded 
over us. Their bright light showed the night re- 
ticulated with thin lines of smoke, like veins of 
calcite in a canopy of black marble. Our imme- 
diate country, pallid and tremulous, fade^ again, 
but in that brief prospect of a shadow land I 
glimpsed a road, the presentment of the long 
road to Bapaume. So the Bapaume road showed 
at night by inconsequential and unexpected lights. 
That hill-crest of leaping trees could be the ridge 
of Loupart with its wood, and Achete in flames 
beyond. The notion gave me enough of our hill 
top. I descended from it. 

There is a public-house at the foot of the hill, 
and a lane of harsh noises and a beam of light 
projected together from its open door across the 
road. Beyond it I turned into a house, for I 
knew I should find there an aged and solitary man 
who would have his own thoughts on such a night 
as this; for he had a son, and the spectre of the 
Bapaume road had reminded me where that boy 
was celebrating whatever peace he knew. His 
father was not communicative; and what could I 
[i6o] 



Joy 

say? He sat, answering me distantly and aus- 
terely, and he might have been a bearded sage see- 
ing in retrospect a world he had long known, and 
who at last had made up his mind about It, though 
he would not tell me what that was. Outside we 
could hear revellers approaching. They paused 
at our door; their feet began to shuffle, and they 
sang: 



"If I catch you bending, 
I'll turn you upside down, 
Knees up, knees up, 
Knees up, knees up, 
Knees up, Father Brown." 



[i6i] 



XXVII. The Real Thing 

JANUARY 9, 1920. There was a country 
town of which we heard wonderful tales 
as children. But it was as far as Cathay. 
It had many of the qualities that once made Ca- 
thay desirable and almost unbelievable. We 
heard of it at the time when we heard of the cities 
of Vanity Fair and Baghdad, and all from a man 
with a beard, who once sat by a London fire, just 
before bedtime, smoking a pipe and telling those 
who were below him on the rug about the past, 
and of more fortunate times, and of cities that 
were fair and far. Nothing was easier for us 
then than to believe fair reports. Good dreams 
must be true, for they are good. Some day, he 
said, he would take us to Torhaven; but he did 
not, for his luck was not like that. 

Nothing like that; so instead we used to look 

westward to where Torhaven would be, whenever 

the sunset appeared the right splendour for the 

sky that was over what was delectable and else- 

[162] 



The Real Thing 

where. We made that do for years. Torhaven 
existed, there was no doubt, for once we made a 
journey to Paddington Station — a long walk — 
and saw the very name on a railway carriage. It 
was a surprising and a happy thought that that 
carriage would go into such a town that very day. 
What is more confident than the innocence of 
youth? Where, if not with youth, could be 
found such willing and generous reliance in noble 
legend? 

And how enduring is its faith ! Long after, 
but not too long after, for fine appearances to us 
still meant fine prospects, wc arrived one morning 
bodily in the haven of good report. Its genius 
was as bright as we expected. It had a shining 
face. It was the equal of the morning. Its folk 
could not be the same as those who lived within 
dark walls under a heaven that was usually but 
murk. It lost nothing because we could examine 
its streets. We went from it with a memory 
even warmer and more comforting. What 
would happen to us if youth did not more than 
merely believe the pleasant tales that are told, if 
it did not loyally desire to believe that things are 
what they are said to be? 

This country town is of the Southern kind 
which, with satisfaction, we show to strangers as 

['63] 



Waiting for Daylight 

something peculiarly of our country. It is an- 
cient and luminous In an amphitheatre of hills, 
and schooners and barques come right among its 
gables. It Is wealthy, but it Is not of the common 
sort, for it never shows haste. It knows, of 
course, that wealth Is cheap, until It has matured 
and has attained that dignity which only leisure 
and the indifference of usage can confer. The 
country around has a long history of well-sound- 
ing family names as native as its hills — they ar- 
rived together, or thereabouts — and the lodge 
gates on its highways, with their weathered and 
mossy heraldic devices, have a way of acquaint- 
ing you with the measure of your inconsequence 
as you pass them when walking. Torhaven has 
no poverty. It tolerates some clean and obscure 
but very profitable manufactures. But Its ship- 
ping is venerable, and is really not an industry 
at all, being as proper as the owning of deer- 
parks. On market day you would think you were 
in a French town, so many are the agriculturists, 
and so quiet and solid the evidence of their well- 
being. They own their farms, they love good 
horses, their wagons are built like ships, and their 
cattle, as aboriginal as the county families, might 
be the embodiment of the sleek genius of those 

[164] 



The Real Thing 

hills and meadows, so famous are they for cream. 
The people of that country live well. They 
know their worth and the substance which they 
add to the strength of the British community. 
And they pride themselves on the legends, pecu- 
liarly theirs, which tell of their independence of 
mind, of their love of freedom, of their liberal 
opinions and the nonconformity of their religious 
views. They are stout folk, kind and compan- 
ionable, and they do not love masters. 

It was the summer following the end of the 
War, and we were back again in Torhaven. The 
recollection of its ancient peace, of its stillness 
and light, of the refuge it offered, had enticed us 
there. Its very name had been the hope of 
escape. Where should we find people more 
likely to be quick and responsive? They would 
be among the first to understand the nature of the 
calamity which had overtaken us. They would 
know, long before amorphous and alien London, 
what that new world should be like which we 
owed to the young, a world in which might grow 
a garden for the bruised souls of the disillu- 
sioned. 

Its light was the same. It was not only un- 
tarnished by such knowledge as we brought with 
[i6s] 



Waiting for Daylight 

us, it was radiant. Yet it was not without its 
memory of the disaster. We went into the 
church, whose porch had been restored; symboli- 
cal, perhaps, of our entry into a world from 
which, happily, the old things had passed. The 
church was empty, for this was market day. 
Through its gloom, as through the penumbra of 
antiquity, shone faintly the pale forms of a few 
recumbent knights, and the permanent appeal of 
their upturned hands and faces kept the roof 
aware of human contrition. Above one of the 
figures was a new Union Jack, crowned with 
laurels. The sun made too vivid a scarlet patch 
of one of its folds. 

Just below the church was the theatre, now a 
cinema hall. This was market day, and the 
house was full. A poster outside pictured a 
bridge blowing up, and a motor-car falling into 
space. The midday sun was looking full at Tor- 
haven's High Street, which runs south and down- 
hill steeply to the quay; a schooner filled the bot- 
tom of the street that day. Anything a not too 
unreasonable man could desire was offered in 
the shops of that thoroughfare. This being a 
time of change, when our thoughts are all unfixed 
and we have had rumours of the New Jerusalem, 
the side window of a fashionable jeweller's was 
[1 66] 



The Real Thing 

devoted to tiny jade pigs, minute dolls, silver 
acorns, and other propitiators of luck which time 
and experience have tested. Next door to the 
jeweller's was a studio supporting the arts, with 
local pottery shaped as etiolated blue cats and 
yellow puppies; and there one could get picture 
postcards of the London favourites in revue, and 
some water-colour paintings of the local coast 
which an advertisement affirmed were real. 

That was not all. Opposite was the one book- 
shop of the town. Its famous bay front and old 
diamond panes frankly presented the new day 
with ladies' handbags, ludo and other games, 
fountain pens, mounted texts from Ella Wilcox, 
local guide books, and apparently a complete 
series — as much as the length of the window 
would hold, at least — of Hall Caine's works ; and 
in one corner prayer-books in a variety of bind- 
ings. 

Down on the quay, sitting on a bollard, with 
one leg stretched stiffly before him, was a young 
native I had not met since one day on the Menin 
Road. I had known him, before that strange 
occasion, as an ardent student of life and letters. 
He had entered a profession in which sound 
learning is essential, though the reward is slight, 
just when the War began. Then he believed, in 

[167] 



Waiting for Daylight 

high seriousness, as young and enthusiastic stu- 
dents did, all he was told in that August: and his 
professional career is now over. 

He pointed out to me mildly, and with a little 
reproach, that I was wrong in supposing Tor- 
haven had not changed. I learned that the War 
had made a great change there. Motor-cars 
were now as commonly owned as bicycles used to 
be, though he admitted that it did not seem that 
the queue waiting to buy books, our sort of books, 
was in need of control by the police. But farm- 
ers who had been tenants when Germany violated 
the independence of Belgium were now freehold- 
ers. Men who were in essential industries, and 
so could not be spared for the guns, were now 
shipowners. We could see for ourselves how 
free and encouraging was the new wealth in this 
new world; true, the size of his pension did not 
fairly reflect the new and more liberal ideas of a 
better world, but we must admit he had no need 
to travel to Bond Street to spend it. "Why 
fear," he asked me, pointing with his crutch up 
the busy High Street behind us, "that what our 
pals in France learned was wrong with that old 
Europe which made the War, will not be known 
there? Have you seen," he said, "our book- 

[168] 



The Real Thing 

shop, our cinema, and the new memorial porch 
of our church?" 

Near us was waiting a resplendent motor-car, 
in which reposed a young lady whose face deco- 
rates the covers of the popular magazines every 
month, and as the wounded soldier finished 
speaking it moved away with a raucous hoot. 



[169] 



XXVIII. Literary Critics 

MARCH 27, 1920. The last number of 
the Chaphook, containing "Three Crit- 
ical Essays on Modern English Po- 
etry," by three well-known critics of literature, I 
read with suspiciously eager attention, for I will 
confess that I have no handy rule, not one that I 
can describe, which can be run over new work in 
poetry or prose with unfailing confidence. My 
credentials as a literary critic would not, I fear, 
bear five minutes' scrutiny; but I never cease to 
look for that defined and adequate equipment, 
such as even a carpenter calls his tool-chest, full 
of cryptic instruments, each designed for some 
particular task, and ev^ery implement named. It 
is sad to have to admit it, but I know I possess 
only a home-made gimlet to test for dry-rot, and 
another implement, a very ancient heirloom, 
snatched at only on blind instinct, a stone ax. 
But these are poor tools, and sooner or later I 
shall be found out. 

There was a time when I was very hopeful 
[170] 



Literary Critics 

about discovering a book on literary criticism 
which would make the rough places plain for me, 
and encourage me to feel less embarrassed when 
present where literary folk were estimating 
poetry and prose. I am such a simple on these 
occasions. If one could only discover the means 
to attain to that rather easy assurance and 
emphasis when making literary comparisons! 
Yet though this interesting number of the Chap- 
book said much that I could agree with at once, 
it left me as isolated and as helpless as before. 
One writer said: "There is but one art of writing, 
and that is the art of poetry. The test of poetry 
is sincerity. The test of sincerity is style; and 
the test of style is personality." Excellent, I 
exclaimed immediately; and then slowly I began 
to suspect a trap somewhere in it. Of course, 
does not the test for sunlight distinguish it at 
once from insincere limelight? But what is the 
test, and would it be of any use to those likely 
to mistake limelight for daylight? 

I cannot say I have ever been greatly helped 
by what I have read concerning the standards 
for literary criticism. Of the many wise and 
learned critics to whose works I have gone for 
light, I can remember only Aristotle, Longinus, 
Tolstoy, and Anatole France — probably because 



Waiting for Daylight 

it is easy for the innocent to agree with dominat- 
ing men. Of the moderns I enjoy reading any- 
thing "Q" has to say about books; useless 
pleasure again, for what does one get but "Q's" 
full, friendly, ironic, and humorous mind? 
Lately, too, the critics have been unanimously 
recommending to us — and that shows the genuine 
value to the community of mere book reviewers 
— the Letters of Tchehov, as noble a document as 
we have had for a very long time. But I thought 
they did not praise Tchehov enough as a critic, 
for that wise and lovable author, among his let- 
ters, made many casual asides about art that were 
pleasing and therefore right to me. I begin to 
fear that most of the good things said about 
literature are said in casual asides. 

If I were asked to say why I preferred Chris- 
tabel or Keats's odes to Tennyson's Revenge or 
the Barrack-Room Ballads, I should find it hard 
to explain satisfactorily to anyone who preferred 
to read Tennyson or Kipling. Where are the 
criteria? Can a Chinaman talk to an Arab? 
The difference, we see at once, is even deeper 
than that of language. It is a difference in na- 
ture ; and we may set up any criterion of literature 
we like, but it will never carry across such a 
chasm. Our only consolation is that we may tell 
[172] 



Literary Critics 

the other man he is on the wrong side of it, but 
he will not care, because he will not see it. The 
means by which we are able to separate what is 
precious in books from the matrix is not a proc- 
ess, and is nothing measurable. It is instinctive, 
and not only differs from age to age, but changes 
in the life of each of us. It is as indefinable as 
beauty itself. An artist may know how to create 
a beautiful thing, but he cannot communicate his 
knowledge except by that creation. That is all 
he can tell us of beauty, and, indeed, he may be 
innocent of the measure of his effort; and the 
next generation may ridicule the very thing which 
gave us so much pleasure, pleasure we proved to 
our own satisfaction to be legitimate and well 
founded by many sound generalizations about 
art. The canons of criticism are no more than 
the apology for our personal preferences, no mat- 
ter how gravely we back them. Sometimes it 
has happened that a book or a poem has suc- 
ceeded in winning the approval of many genera- 
tions, and so we may call it a classic. Yet what 
is the virtue of a classic, or of the deliberate and 
stately billows going with the wind when the 
world has sweep and is fair, or of a child with a 
flower, or of the little smile on the face of the 
dead boy in the muck when the guns were filling 

[173] 



Waiting for Daylight 

us with fear and horror of .mankind? I don't 
know; but something in us appears to save us 
from the punishing comet of Zeus. 



[174] 



XXL The South Downs 

MAY 22, 1920. The southern face of 
the hill fell, an abrupt promontory, to 
the woods of the plain. Its face was 
scored by the weather, and the dry drainage chan- 
nels were headlong cascades of grey pebbles. 
Clumps of heather, sparse oak scrub with young 
leaves of bronze, contorted birch, and this year's 
croziers of the bracken (heaven knows their 
secret for getting lush aromatic sap out of such 
stony poverty), all made a tough life which held 
up the hill, steep as it was; though the hill was 
going, for the roots of some of the oaks were 
exposed, empty coils of rope from which the bur- 
den had slipped. In that sea of trees whose bil- 
lows came to the foot of our headland, and out 
of sight beneath its waves, children were walking, 
gathering bluebells. We knew they were there, 
for we could hear their voices. But there was 
no other sign of our form of life except a neolithic 
flint scraper one of us had picked up on the hill- 
top. The marks of the man who made it were 
as clear as the voices below. It had been lost 

[175] 



Waiting for Daylight 

since yesterday, it might be — anyhow, about the 
day the first Pyramid was finished. It depends 
on how one looks at the almanac. For you could 
feel the sun fire was young. It had not been 
long kindled. Its heat in the herbage was moist. 
One of the youngsters with me, bruising the 
bracken and snufiing it, said it smelt of almond 
and cucumber. Another said the crushed birch 
leaves smelt of sour apples. We could not say 
what the oak leaves smelt like. Then another 
grabbed a handful of leafmould, damp and brown 
and full of fibre. What did that smell of? 
They were not sure that they liked it. Perhaps 
it was the smell of the hill. They admitted that 
it wasn't a bad smell. They seemed a little 
afraid of that odour. 

But I was trying to read, and neolithic times 
and the bluebell gatherers had run together. 
They were in the same day. My book had made 
of that May morning in Surrey an apparition 
without time and place. We hear ourselves 
laughing now, intent, for instance, on confirming 
the almond and cucumber in bruised bracken, or 
catch the sound of our serious voices raised in a 
dispute over literature or politics. But these 
things are not really in our minds. We would 
not betray our secret thoughts to bluebell gath- 

[176] 



The South Downs 

ercrs and boys snuffing the bracken. This book 
I was reading, and a fancied resemblance in that 
hill and its prospect, moved the shadows again — 
they are so readily moved — and I saw two of us 
in France on such a hill, gazing intently and in- 
nocently over just such a prospect, in the summer 
of 19 1 5, without in the least guessing what, in 
that landscape before us, was latent for us both. 
Those downs across the way would be Beaumont 
Hamel and Thiepval, Bluebells ! The pub- 
lishers may send out what advice they choose to 
authors concerning the unpopularity of books 
about the War — always excepting, of course, the 
important reminiscences, the soft and heavy 
masses of words of the great leaders of the na- 
tions in the War, which merely reveal that they 
never knew what they were doing. Certainly we 
could spare that kind of war book, though it con- 
tinues to arrive in abundance; a volume by a 
famous soldier explaining why affairs went 
strangely wrong is about the last place where we 
should look for anything but folly solemnly pon- 
dering unrealities. But whatever the publishers 
may say, we do want books about the War 
by men who were in it. Some of us have learned 
by now that France is a memory of such a nature 
that, though it is not often we dare stop to look 

[177] 



Waiting for Daylight 

directly at it, for the day's work must be done, yet 
it looms through the importance of each of these 
latter days as though the event of our lives were 
past, and we were at present merely watching the 
clock. The shadow of what once was in France 
is an abiding presence for us. We know nothing 
can happen again which will release us from it. 
And yet how much has been written of it? That 
is the measure of its vastness and its mystery — 
it possesses the minds of many men, but they are 
silent on what they know. They rarely speak of 
it, except to one of the fraternity. But where are 
their thoughts? Wandering, viewless and un- 
easy wraiths, over Flanders, in Artois and 
Picardy. Those thoughts will never come home 
again to stay. 

It is strange to me that publishers should sup- 
pose that books, intimate about the invisible but 
abiding shadow which is often more potent than 
present May sunshine, should not be wanted. 
Take for example this book I was reading, The 
Sqiiadroon, by Ardern Beaman. To induce 
readers to buy it it has a picture on its dust-cover 
which kept me from reading it for weeks. This 
wrapper shows a ghostly knight in armour lead- 
ing a charge of British cavalry in this War. I 
should have thought we had had enough of that 

[178] 



The South Downs 

romantic nonsense during the actual events. The 
War was written for the benefit of readers who 
made a hixury of the sigh, and who were told 
and no doubt preferred to believe that the young 
soldier went into battle with the look we so ad- 
mire in the picture called The Soul's Awakening. 
He was going to glory. There are no dead. 
There are only memorial crosses for heroes and 
the Last Post. The opinions of most civilians on 
the War were as agreeable as stained-glass win- 
dows. The thought of a tangle of a boy's in- 
side festooned on rusty wire would naturally have 
spoiled the soul's awakening and the luxury of the 
sigh. I heard of a civilian official, on his way to 
Paris after the Armistice, who was just saved by 
rapid explanations from the drastic attention of a 
crowd of Tommies who mistook him for a War 
Correspondent. 

But Mr. Beaman's book is not like war cor- 
respondence. It can be commended to those who 
were not there, but who wish to hear a true word 
or two. Mr. Beaman as a good-natured man re- 
members how squeamish wc are, and being also 
shy and dainty indicates some matters but briefly. 
I wish, for one thing, that when describing the 
doings of his cavalry squadron after the disaster 
on the Fifth Army front — the author enables you 

[■79] 



Waiting for Daylight 

to feel how slender was the line of resolute men 
which then saved the Army from downfall — he 
had ventured to record with more courage the 
things which it shamed him to see. Why should 
only such as he know of those shocks to affability? 
But all he says about some unpleasant matters is: 
"During those days we saw things of which it is 
not good to speak — of which afterwards we 
never did speak, except late at nights, in the 
privacy of our own mess." 

Mr. Beaman's simple narrative, however, with 
its humanity and easy humour, often lets in light 
on strange affairs, as though he had forgotten 
what had been locked up, and had carelessly 
opened a forbidden door. He shuts it again at 
once, like a gentlemen, and we follow him round 
hoping that presently he will do the same again. 
Ambrose Bierce could have made something of 
what is suggested in such a passage as this : 

"On the borders of this horrid desolation (the Somme) 
we met a Salvage Company at work. That warren of 
trenches and dugouts extended for untold miles. . . . 
They warned us, if we insisted on going further in, not 
to let any man go singly, but only in strong parties, as 
the Golgotha was peopled with wild men, British, 
French, Australian, German deserters, who lived there 
underground, like ghouls among the mouldering dead, 
and who came out at nights to plunder and kill. In 

[1 80] 



The South Downs 

the night, an officer said, mingled with the snarling of 
carrion dogs, they often heard inhuman cries and rifle- 
shots coming from that awful wilderness. Once they 
(the Salvage Company) had put out, as a trap, a basket 
containing food, tobacco, and a bottle of whisky. But 
the following morning they found the bait untouched, 
and a note in the basket, 'Nothing doing!'" 



[i8i] 



XXX. Kipling 

JUNE 5, 1920. One day, when I did not 
know Kipling's name, I found in a cabin 
of a ship from Rangoon two paper-cov- 
ered books, with a Calcutta imprint, smelling of 
something, whatever it was, that did not exist in 
England. The books were Plain Tales from the 
Hills and Soldiers Three. It was high summer, 
and in that cabin of a ship in the Albert Dock, 
with its mixed odour of tea, teak, and cheroots, I 
read through all. The force in those stories 
went nearer to capturing me completely than any- 
thing I have read since. I can believe now that 
I just escaped taking a path which would have 
given me a world totally different from the one I 
know, and the narrowness of the escape makes 
me feel tolerant towards the young people who 
give up typewriting and book-keeping, and go out 
into an unfriendly world determined to be Mary 
Pickfords and Charlie Chaplins. A boy boards 
a ship merely to get a parrot, and his friend, who 
brought it from Burma, has gone to Leadenhall 
Street; there is a long interval, with those books 

[1821 



Kipling 

lying in a bunk. Such a trivial incident — some- 
thing like it happening every week to everybody 
— and to-day that boy, but for the Grace of God, 
might be reading the leaders of the Morning 
Post as the sole relief to a congested mind, going 
every week to the cartoon of Punch as to barley 
water for chronic prickly heat, and talking of 
dealing with the heterodox as the Holy Office 
used to deal with unbaptized Indian babies for 
the good of their little souls. 

I have recovered from those astonishing ad- 
ventures with Kipling. I may read him to-day 
with enjoyment, but safe from excitation. This 
is due, perhaps, to a stringy constitution, subject 
to bilious doubts, which loves to see lusty Youth 
cock its hat when most nervous, swagger with 
merry insolence to hide the uncertainty which 
comes of self-conscious inexperience, assume a 
cynical shrewdness to protect its credulity, and 
imitate the abandon of the hard fellow who has 
been to Hong, Kong, Tal Tal, and Delagoa Bay. 
We enjoy seeing Youth act thus; but one learns 
in time that a visit to Rhodesia, worse luck, makes 
one no more intelligent than a week-end at 
Brighton. Well, it doesn't matter. What in- 
grates we should be now to turn on Kiphng be- 
cause we disagree with the politics he prefers, 

[183] 



Waiting for Daylight 

those loud opinions of his which, when we get too 
much of them, remain in the ears for a while like 
the echoes of a brass tray which a hearty child 
banged for a drum. Though we hold the British 
Constitution as sacred as the family vault we do 
not think the less of Dickens because the awful 
spectacle of our assembled legislators made him 
laugh, nor do we leave the room when Beethoven 
is played because his careless regard for a mon- 
arch's divine right is painful to us. If Kipling 
had not given us My Sunday at Home and The 
Incarnation of Krishna Mulvaney, how should 
we have got them? 

I have just read Kipling's book. Letters of 
Travel. Its attractive title drew me to it, and is 
to blame. Kipling has an uncanny gift of sight. 
It prompts no divination in him, but its curiosity 
misses nothing that is superficial. If he had 
watched the Crucifixion, and had been its sole 
recorder, we should have had a perfect repre- 
sentation of the soldiers, the crowds, the weather, 
the smells, the colours, and the three uplifted 
figures; so lively a record that it would be im- 
mortal for the fidelity and commonness of Its 
physical experience. But we should never have 
known more about the central figure than that 
He was a cool and courageous rebel. Kipling 

[184] 



Kipling 

can make a picture of an indifferent huddle of 
fishing boats in a stagnant harbour which is more 
enjoyable than being there. Letters from such a 
traveller would attract one directly across the 
bookshop. But these letters of his were ad- 
dressed to his friends the Imperialists before the 
War, and one may guess the rest. Such an ex- 
posure moves one to sorrow over a writer whose 
omniscience used to make the timorous believe 
that arrogance, if lively enough, had some advan- 
tage over reason. 

Yet there is in a few of the letters enough to 
show what we missed because they were not ad- 
dressed to himself, or to anybody but a Com- 
posite Portrait of The Breed. There are pas- 
sages in the chapter called "Half a Dozen Pic- 
tures" which clear all irritation from the mind 
(for many of the author's insults are studied and 
gratuitous) and leave nothing but respect for the 
artist. These come when the artist sees only a 
riot of Oriental deck passengers, bears, and ma- 
caws, in the tropics; or a steamer coming round, 
exposed by a clarity like crystal in the trough of 
immense seas somewhere in the neighbourhood 
of the Auckland Islands at dayfall. We get 
such impressions when Kipling has, for the mo- 
ment, forgotten the need to make a genuflection 

[185] 



Waiting for Daylight 

towards the Absolute and Everlasting Chutney, 
and Is a man and brother delighting in his craft. 
The rest of the book has, one must admit, a 
value, but it is an undesigned value; indeed, its 
value is that it was designed to prove, at the time 
it was written, something quite different. From 
this book, with its recurring contempt for Eng- 
land, you may sec what value we need have at- 
tached to much that the assured and the violent 
ever had to tell us about our Empire. If this 
publication is, indeed, an act of contrition for 
words unwisely written, then it should be read as 
a warning by all who write. Materialists natur- 
ally attach to transient circumstances a value 
which the less patriotic of us might think not 
really material. "We discussed, first of all, un- 
der the lee of a wet deck-house in mid-Atlantic; 
man after man cutting in and out of the talk as 
he sucked at his damp tobacco." There is no 
doubt Kipling supposes that the wet deck-house 
adds a value to the words spoken under its lee- 
side. Yet the words he reports are what one 
may hear, with grief, any day in any tavern in the 
hurry and excitement of ten minutes before clos- 
ing time. But Kipling always thought an opin- 
ion gained in value if expressed elsewhere than in 
England. His ideal government would be a 
[1 86] 



Kipling 

polo-player from Simla leading the crew of the 
Bolivar. 

Every horror in the world, the author of these 
letters tells us, has its fitting ritual. How 
easily, too, one realizes it, when feeling again the 
fanatic heat and force of this maker of old magic 
with the tom-tom; the vicious mockery, certain of 
popular applause, of ideas that are not market- 
able; the abrupt rancour whenever the common 
folk must be mentioned; the spite felt for Eng- 
land — "in England . . . you see where the 
rot starts"; the sly suspicion of other countries, 
and the consequent jealousy and fear; here it all 
is, convulsive, uncertain, inflammable. The 
prophet of Empire ! But the prophecy was 
wrong. England, "where the rot starts," bore 
most of the heat and burden of the day, and 
saved the Empire for the money-mongers. And 
what of the British youngsters who did that, who 
were not materialists in the least, but many of 
them the idealists for whom no abuse once could 
be too vicious? The corruption of the Somme! 
That faceless and nameless horror was the apo- 
theosis of the Imperialist. 



[187] 



XXXI. A Devon Estuary 

SEPTEMBER 1 1, 1920. "This areary ex- 
panse," the guide-book explains, "will not 
attract the tourist." The guide was 
right. I was alone to that degree beyond mere 
solitude when you feel you are not alone, 
but that the place itself is observing you. Yet 
only five miles away long lines of motor-cars 
were waiting to take tourists, at ruinous prices, 
to the authentic and admitted beauty spots. 
There was not, as the polite convention would 
put it, a soul about. It was certainly a dreary 
expanse, but the sunlight there seemed strangely 
brilliant, I thought, and, what was more curious, 
appeared to be alive. It was quivering. The 
transient glittering of some seagulls remote in 
the blue was as if you could glimpse, now and 
then, fleeting hints of what is immaculate in 
heaven. Nothing of our business was In sight 
anywhere except the white stalk of a lighthouse, 
and that, I knew, was miles away across the es- 
tuary whose waters were then invisible, for It 
was not only low tide, but I was descending to the 

[188] 



A Devon Estuary- 
saltings, having left the turf of the upper salt 
marshes. 

You felt that here in the saltings you were be- 
yond human associations. The very vegetation 
was unfamiliar. The thrift, sea lavender, 
rocket, sea campion, and maritime spurge did not 
descend so low as this. They came no nearer 
than where the highest tidal marks left lines of 
driftwood and bleached shells, just below the 
break of the upper marshes. Here it was an- 
other kingdom, neither sea nor land, but each al- 
ternately during the spring tides. At first the 
sandy mud was reticulated with sun-cracks, not 
being daily touched by the sea, and the crevasses 
gave a refuge for algae. There was a smell, 
neither pleasant nor unpleasant, which reminded 
you of something so deep in the memory that you 
could not give it a name. But it was sound and 
good. Beyond that dry flat the smooth mud 
glistened as if earth were growing a new skin, 
which yet was very tender. It was spongy, but 
it did not break when I trod on it, though the 
earth complained as I went. It was thinly sprin- 
kled with a plant like little fingers of green glass, 
the maritime samphire, and in the distance this 
samphire gave the marsh a sheen of continuous 
and vivid emerald. 

[189] 



Waiting for Daylight 

The saltings looked level and unbroken. But 
on walking seaward I was continually surprised 
by drainage channels. These channels serpen- 
tined everywhere, and were deep and wide. 
Sometimes they contained nothing but silt, and 
sometimes they were salt-water rivers. I came 
upon each canyon unexpectedly. The first warn- 
ing was a sudden eruption from it, a flock of dun- 
lin, a flock which then passed seawards In a regi- 
mented flight that was an alternate flash of light 
and a swift shadow. Dunlin, curlew, oyster- 
catchers, or gulls, left a gully just before I knew 
I was headed off again. In one of these creeks, 
however, the birds left me more than their deli- 
cate footprints to examine. They left there a 
small craft whose mast I had long taken to be a 
stump projecting from the mud. A young man 
In a brown beard, a brown shirt, and a pair of 
khaki trousers was sitting on its skylight. He 
hailed, and showed me how I could get to him 
without sinking up to more than the knees In this 
dreary spot. 

"Stay here If you like," he said, when I was 
with him. "When the tide is full I'll pull you 
round to the village." It was a little cutter of 
about fifteen tons, moored to the last huge links 
of a cable, the rest of which had long been cov- 
[190] 



A Devon Estuary 

ered up. I thought he was making holiday in 
a novel way. "No," he replied, "I'm living 
here." 

It seems (I am but paraphrasing his apology) 
that he returned from Cambrai, bringing back 
from France, as a young officer, some wounds and 
other decorations, but also his youthful credulity 
and a remembrance of society's noble promises to 
its young saviours. But not long after his re- 
turn to us the sight of us made him feel disap- 
pointed. He "stuck it," he said, as long as he 
could. But the more he observed us the worse he 
felt. That was why he gave up a good position 
a second time on our account. "What was the 
good of the money? The profiteers took most 
of it. I worked hard, and had to give up what I 
earned to every kind of parasite. London was 
more disagreeable than ever was Flanders. Yet 
I think I would not object to sweep the roads for 
a community of good people. Yes, I thought 
nothing could be worse than the dead in the mud. 
But I found something worse. The minds of the 
living who did not know what I knew in France 
were worse to me. I couldn't remember the 
friends I'd lost and remain where I was with 
those people about me. It was more awful than 
that German — did you ever meet him? — who lay 

[191] 



Waiting for Daylight 

just the other side of the parapet for weeks and 
weeks." 

His only companion now is a paraffin stove, 
which does not, perhaps, require a gas-mask to. 
aid in its companionship, though about that I 
won't be sure. The only conversation he hears 
is that of the curlews ; subdued, cheerful, and very 
intimate voices, having just that touch of melan- 
choly which intimacy, when it is secure and genu- 
ine, is sure to give, however jolly the intimacy 
may be. He said that at first he was afraid he 
could not live on what little money he had, and 
must earn casually, after buying the boat, but "it's 
easier to live than I thought. There's not nearly 
as much worry needed as I used to suppose. It is 
surprising how much one can do without. I was 
rather scared at first when I got rid of my sense 
of duty. But, after all, it is not so hard to be 
free. Perhaps the world already has more soft 
and easy people than is good for it. I find one 
benefit of this life is that, being free of the crowd, 
I feel indifferent about the way the crowd chooses 
to go. I don't care now what the public does — • 
that's its own affair, and I hope it will enjoy it." 
After a silence he said: "That sounds selfish, I 
know. And I'm not sure yet that it isn't. Any- 
[192] 



A Devon Estuary 

how, if one could help one's fellows one would. 
But is it possible to help them? When did they 
last listen to reason? The only guides they will 
listen to are frauds obvious enough to make an ass 
lay back his ears. Well, I think I'll wait here 
till the crowd knows enough to stop before it gets 
to the edge of the steep place — if it can stop now." 
I asked him what he read. "Very little. I 
fish more than I read. You'd think It would take 
only a week to learn all there is here. I should 
have thought so once. I see now that I shall 
never thoroughly know this estuary. It's a won- 
derful place. Every tide is a new experience. I 
am beginning to feel right again." In the boat, 
going round to the village, he learned I was a 
writer, rested on his oars, and drifted with the 
tide. "I'll give you a job," he said. "Write a 
book that will make people hate the idea that the 
State is God as Moloch was at last hated. Turn 
the young against it. The latest priest is the 
politician. No ritual in any religion was worse 
than this new worship of the State. If men don't 
wake up to that then they are doomed." He be- 
gan then to pull me towards humanity again. 



[193] 



XXXII. Barbellion 

DECEMBER i8, 1920. When posterity 
feels curious to discover what may have 
caused the disaster to our community it 
win get a little light from the merry confessions 
of our contemporary great folk. Let It read 
Colonel Replngton's Diary^ Mrs. Asqulth's book, 
and the memoirs of General French. The gen- 
eral, of course, Implies that he was so puzzled by 
the neutrality of time and space, and by the fact 
that the treacherous enemy was In trenches and 
used big guns. Our descendants may learn from 
these innocent revelations what quality of knowl- 
edge and temper, to be found only In a superior 
caste, guided the poor and lowly, and shaped our 
fate for us. They will know why wars and fam- 
ines were Inevitable for us, and why nothing could 
avert doom from the youth of our Europe. 
There is no disputing the Importance of these 
confessions. But their relationship to literature? 
For that matter they might be linoleum. Yet 

[194] 



Barbellion 

there has been a book of confessions published 
recently which may be read as literature when the 
important gossip with the vast sales is merely 
curious evidence for historians equipped for psy- 
chological analysis. I mean Barbellion's Jour- 
nal of a Disappointed Man. 

It will interest our descendants to learn that 
outside the circle which Colonel Repington re- 
ports at its dinner-tables where the ladies were so 
diverting, the fare usually excellent, and the gen- 
tlemen discussed the "combing out" of mere men 
for places hke Ypres, there was genuine knowl- 
edge and warm understanding. Beyond those 
cheerful dinner-tables, and in that outer darkness 
of which the best people knew nothing except that 
it was possible to rake it fruitfully with a comb, 
there was a host of young men from which could 
be manifested the courageous intellectual curios- 
ity, the ardour for truth, the gusto for life, and 
the love of earth, which we see in Kecling's letters 
and Barbellion's diary. All Is shown in these 
two books in an exceptional degree, and. In Bar- 
bellion's diary, is expressed with a remarkable 
wit and acuteness, and not seldom, as in the 
description of a quarry, of a Beethoven Sym- 
phony, of a rock-pool of the Devon coast, with a 
beauty that is startling. 

[195] 



Waiting for Daylight 

Keeling was killed In the War. Barbclllon 
(who, as we know now, was Bruce Cummings) 
never went to France, for he was dying, though 
he did not know it, when he presented himself for 
medical examination. But It is clear that though 
secluded from the turmoil In a country cottage, 
paralyzed, and his trunk already dead. Barbel- 
lion's sensitive mind and imaginative sympathy 
knew more of what was happening to his fellows 
In France, and what it meant for us all, than the 
combined Cabinet in Downing Street. That 
spark of dying light was aware when the lumi- 
naries on whom we depended were blind and igno- 
rant. In his Last Diary, and within a day or two 
of his death, he wrote of the Peace Treaty (May, 
1 919) : "After all the bright hopes of last au- 
tumn, justice will be done only when all the power 
Is vested in the people. Every liberal-minded 
man must feel the shame of it." But did such 
men feel the shame of It? Refer to what the 
popular writers, often liberal-minded, said about 
the shame they felt at the time, and compare. 
To Barbelllon, by the light of his expiring lamp, 
was revealed what was hidden from nearly all ex- 
perienced and active publicists. Is there any 
doubt still of the superiority of imagination over 
hard-headedness ? 

[196] 



Barbellion 

Imagination instantly responds. Percolation 
is a slow process in the hard head of the worldly- 
wise. When we know that in the elderly, the 
shrewd, and the practical, the desire for material 
power and safety, qualified only by fear, served 
as their substitute for the City of God during the 
War, it is heartening to remember that there were 
select though unknown young men, mere subjects 
for "combing" like Barbellion, who made articu- 
late an immense rebellious protest that was in the 
best of our boys; who showed a mocking intui- 
tion into us and our motives, as though we were 
a species apart; a scorn of the world we had made 
for them, a cruel knowledge of the cowardice and 
meanness at the back of our warlike minds, and a 
yearning for that world of beauty which might 
have been, but which the acts of the clever and the 
practical have turned into carrion among the 
ruins. Would it matter now if we were bank- 
rupt, and our Empire among the things that were, 
if only we were turning to sackcloth and ashes be- 
cause of that dousing of the glim in the heart of 
the young? 

This last diary of Bruce Cummings is sad 
enough, for he could but lie inert, listen to the last 
news of the War, and wonder incidentally who 
would come to him first — the postman bringing 

[197] 



Waiting for Daylight 

the reviews of his first book, or the bony old gen- 
tleman bringing the scythe. He felt, of course, 
the mockery of this frustration of his powers. 
He thought — and, it seemed, with good reason — 
that he was a tragic failure. But was he? Read 
his books, and admit that he accomplished a little 
that is beautiful and enduring, and that he did it 
obscurely at a time when they who held most of 
the fearful attention of the world were but work- 
ing gravely on what their children would execrate. 
Some critics find in the diary of Barbellion's 
last days evidence that he remembered he was 
writing for an audience. It may be there, but it 
is not plain to me. It is likely that if we were 
writing a paragraph while doubtful whether the 
hair which held the sword over us would last till 
we had finished, we might find we were not so joy- 
ously abandoned to pure art as we used to be. 
The interest of the book is that it is some more of 
Bruce Cummings when we could not have ex- 
pected another line from him. Apart even from 
their literary value, it seems to me that some day 
his three volumes may prove to bear historic 
witness as important as that of Colonel Reping- 
ton's diary. It was just such minds as Barbel- 
lion's, not uncommon in the youth of our war 
time — though in his case the unusual intuitions 

[198] 



Barbellion 

and adventurous aspirations were defined by 
genius — it was such minds that the war-mongers 
condemned and destroyed. Those men were 
selected for sarcifice because they had the very 
qualities which, when lost to the community, then 
it dies in its soul. They were candid with them- 
selves, and questioned our warranty with the 
same candour, but were modest and reticent; 
they were kindly to us when they knew we were 
wooden and wrong, and did our bidding, judg- 
ing it was evil. In France they subdued their in- 
surgent thoughts — -and what that sacrifice meant 
to them in the lonely night watches I have been 
privileged to learn — and surrendered, often in 
terrible derision, to our will; and then in 
cool and calculated audacity devised the very 
tasks in which the bravest and most intelligent 
would be the first to die. 



[199] 



XXXIII. Breaking the Spell 

APRIL 8, 1 92 1. My seat by the Serpen- 
tine was under a small and almost impal- 
pable cloud of almond petals. The 
babbling of ducks somewhere in the place where 
the water seemed a pale and wavering fire was 
like the sound of the upwelling of the hidden 
spring of life. This was the spot where I could 
sit and there quietly match the darker shades of 
trouble in the afternoon papers, the time being 
April in England, and the sky ineffable. There 
was not a trace of mourning in the sky; not a 
black-edged cloud. But human life, being an ur- 
gent and serious affair, and not a bright blue emp- 
tiness like Heaven; human life being a state of 
trial in which, as favoured beings, we are "heated 
hot with burning fears and dipped in baths of hiss- 
ing tears" for our own good, could not be ex- 
pected to look as pleasant, during so severe a 
necessary process, as almond trees in blossom. 
So I sat down and prepared to measure, from the 
[200] 



Breaking the Spell 

news in the papers, the depth of the present bor- 
der on our daily memorial card. 

The black border was rather a deep one, when 
measured. The fears were fairly hot. There 
were no noticeable signs of any tears in the 
papers, so far, but one could guess there would be 
a deep extinguishing bath of them ready to hiss 
presently, if all went well, and our affairs had un- 
interrupted development under the usual clever 
guides. And we had the guides. I could see 
that. The papers were loud with the inspira- 
tions of friends of ours who had not missed a 
single lesson of the War for those who were not 
in it; who were still resolute in that last and in- 
dispensable ditch which no foe is ever likely to 
reach. But by now the almond's cloud had van- 
ished. I no longer heard the bubbling of the 
well of life. 

I finished reading the papers. Now I knew 
our current fate, and felt as if I heard again the 
gas gong going continuously. I had the feeling 
in April, unknown to any snail on the thorn, that 
the park was deafening with the clangour of pal- 
lid, tense, and contending lunatics. The Serpen- 
tine had receded from this tumult. Its tranquil 
shimmering was now fatuous and unbelievable. 
It was but half seen; its glittering was a distant 
[201] 



Waiting for Daylight 

grimacing and mockery at my troubled human in- 
telligence. It was nothing to do with me, and 
showed it in that impertinent way. Two ducks, 
two absurd ducks, suddenly appeared before me 
on the polished water. They were bowing 
politely to each other — only I was looking at 
them — and were making soothing noises in im- 
becile ignorance of the fate overhanging us all. 
There was a boy not far away. He stood as still 
as a thought entranced. He was watching a boat 
with a paper sail. He was as intent as if he were 
God observing the progress of Columbus, know- 
ing now that America is about to be found. 

If that boy had but guessed what I knew! 
But he had not read the latest news. It is the 
privilege of knowledge to be superior and grave; 
to be able to smile sadly at the dream of a Golden 
Galleon which childhood sees in April by the 
Serpentine; for knov/ledge is aware of the truth, 
the tumult surrounding us of contentious lunatics, 
endless, inexplicable; the noise of mankind in its 
upward journey towards the eclipse, or some 
other heavenly mystery. 

Presently that tinted mist which was a tree in 

flower began to shine again through the dark 

noise which the papers had made. The uproar 

cleared a little. The water came nearer, its 

[202] 



Breaking the Spell 

glittering growing stronger, Its fire burning to- 
wards me. I saw In surprise through the gloom 
in my mind that the fire had touched the elms; 
their dark masses were faintly luminous. And 
the mallard drake, riding on the outer pulses of 
that radiation, was purple and emerald. But 
would the beauty of the spring surprise us, I 
wonder; would it still give the mind a twinge, 
sadden us with a nameless disquiet, shoot through 
us so keen an anguish when the almond tree is 
there again on a bright day, if we were decent, 
healthy, and happy creatures? Perhaps not. It 
is hard to say. It is a great while since our skin- 
less and touchy crowds of the wonderful indus- 
trial era, moving as one man to the words of the 
daily papers, were such creatures. Perhaps we 
should merely yawn and stretch ourselves, feel re- 
vived with the sun a little warmer on our backs, 
and snuff up a pleasant smell which we remem- 
bered; begin to whistle, and grope for an adze. 

But we cannot have it so. The spring is not 
for us. We have been so inventive. We have 
desired other things, and we have got them. We 
have cleverly made a way of life that exacts so 
close an attention, if we would save it from dis- 
aster, that we are now its prisoners. Peace and 
freedom have become but a vision which the im- 
[203] 



Waiting for Daylight 

prisoned view through the bars they themselves 
have made. The spring we see now is in a world 
not ours, a world we have left, which is still close 
to us, but is unapproachable. The children are 
in it, and even, apparently, the ducks. It is a 
world we see sometimes, as a reminder — once a 
year or so — of what we could have made of life, 
and what we have. 

Which is the real world? I worried over that 
as I was leaving the park. I seemed to be getting 
nearer to reality near Rotten Row. A reassuring 
policeman was in sight. Motor-cars that were 
humiliating with their enamel and crystal were 
threading about. The fashionable ladies and 
their consorts seemed to be in no doubt about the 
world they were in. I began to feel mean and 
actual. While thus composing my mind I chanced 
to look backwards. A miniature glade was 
there, where the tree-trunks were the columns in 
an aisle. Was it a sward between them? I 
doubt whether we could walk It. I call it green. 
I know of no other word. Perhaps the sun was 
playing tricks with it. It may not have been 
there. As I kept my eye on it, disbelieving that 
light — desirous to believe it, but unable to, faith 
being weak — a rabbit moved into the aisle. I 
call it a rabbit, for I know no other word. But I 
[204] 



Breaking the Spell 

declare now that I do not accept that creature. 
It sat up, and watched me. I don't say it was 
there. As far as I know, any rabbit would have 
been terrified with all those people about. But 
not this apparition, its back to the sunset, with an 
aura and radiant whiskers of gold. It regarded 
me steadfastly. I looked around to see if I were 
alone in this. 

The policeman was unconscious of it. The 
lady who sat on the chair opposite, the lady with 
the noticeable yellow legs, was talking in anima- 
tion, but I doubt it was about this rabbit. The 
saunterers were passing without a sign. But one 
little girl stood, her hands behind her, oblivious of 
all but that admonitory creature In an unearthly 
light, and was smiling at It. It was the only con- 
firmation I had. I have no recollection now of 
what I saw in the day's paper. I have later and 
better news. 



THE . END 



[205] 



Deacidified using the Bookkeeper proces 
Neu ra„z,ng agent: Magnesium Ox^ 
Treatment Date: July 2009 

in Thomson Park Drive 
Cranbero, Township, PA 16066 
(724) 779-2111 



ISV^ 



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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 

iiir "11 



li Mil I'll. 
014 135 957 5 



